Transnational Collaborative Web Archiving: The International Internet Preservation Consortium By Abigail Grotke (Assistant Head, Digital Content Management Section, Web Archiving Program, Library of Congress, and 2021 Chair of the International Internet Preservation Consortium) <abgr@loc.gov> and Olga Holownia (Senior Program Officer, International Internet Preservation Consortium) <olga@netpreserve.org> “Web archiving is a pretty heavy rucksack but it is full of interesting challenges of all types: scientific, technical, legal and operational.” — John Tuck, From Integration to Web Archiving, 2007
Introduction Even in its early days, the Internet posed challenges for those who recognized the need to capture and archive it for future generations. Effectively tackling the myriad of web archiving challenges was impossible for any one institution to solve by itself. Collaboration was deemed necessary even from the beginning. Archives and libraries began archiving the Internet starting in the mid-1990s. Many are aware of the Internet Archive (IA) and its Wayback Machine. Less well-known is that national libraries, charged with preserving the output of their citizens through legal mandates or legislation, noted the importance of documenting this global resource about the same time that IA began crawling the web. While not at the same scale as IA, and with different missions, approaches and legal frameworks, national libraries and archives began to capture portions of the Internet that were important to them, focusing on preserving entire national domains, for instance, or documenting events such as elections in their countries.
Teaming Up to Preserve a Global Web The first international web archiving collaboration started in 1997 as the Nordic Web Archive (NWA) and involved the National Libraries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In 2003, eleven national libraries — the NWA members plus the British Library, Library and Archives Canada, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia, National Library of France, National Library of Italy (Florence) — and IA signed an agreement that established the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).
repositories of resources, the IIPC has been providing a forum for the sharing of knowledge about web archiving and raising awareness of Internet preservation issues. Supported by membership fees, the IIPC funds a number of strategic initiatives, including projects, working group activities, training events, conferences and one full-time Senior Program Officer. The consortium structure includes an executive board and a steering committee. Besides the Senior Program Officer, the other officer roles are individuals from member organizations who volunteer their time, and all working group and project leadership roles are performed on top of regular work duties back at their home institutions.
Building Community through Collaborative Projects and Working Groups Collaboration and community building have been at the core of all IIPC activities. The current IIPC member obligations state that “every member is expected to work collaboratively, within its country’s legislative framework, to identify, develop and facilitate implementation of solutions for selecting, harvesting, collecting, preserving and providing access to Internet content.” IIPC members hold a unique combination of expertise. Participants range from program managers and library administrators, to technical staff and curatorial teams that perform a variety of web archiving tasks at their home organizations. Member institutions primarily make contributions to the IIPC by dedicating personnel time to projects. Through working groups, and portfolios that focus on member engagement, partnerships and outreach, and tools development, the IIPC community has been actively involved in organizing a number of technical, curatorial, educational, and outreach projects.
Since its inception, the IIPC has grown five-fold to include members from over 35 countries across the world. About 85 percent are libraries (national, regional, academic), with the rest being non-profit organizations, audiovisual institutes, and services providers. Each is committed to sharing best practices, and developing tools and resources for the global cultural heritage community. To achieve its goals, the IIPC members have formed working groups and task forces to develop and recommend standards for collecting, preserving and providing long-term access, and, more recently, to produce training materials, create transnational web archive collections and offer resources for researchers. Building on the early ideas to create a “web archiving toolkit,” the IIPC has facilitated the development and sustainability of open source software and tools through a number of funded projects led by members. And through its annual conference, various communication platforms, and collaboratively maintained
14 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022
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