Growing a web archiving program: A case study for evolving an organization-management plan

Abstract

Web archiving presents a number of technical and organizational challenges for libraries. The University of Alberta Libraries has been using Archive-IT to manage a web archiving program for since 2009. This presentation will describe the history of web archiving at the University of Alberta and show the evolution of those services over time. Web archiving is not just technically challenging, it can also be organizationally challenging. Alberta has elected to use a distributed model for collection management by spreading the work for collection development and maintenance across subject librarians and library support staff. Some of the challenges of such a management plan include collection scoping, skill transfer, quality assurance, and metadata creation. The libraries also collaborate with regional and national consortia while working to expand services to researchers and casual users of the library. Attendees will takeaway lessons about collection management, collaboration, and research services for web archives.