Month: January 2020

IIPC Steering Committee Election 2020: nomination statements

IIPC Programme and Communications Officer1 Comment

The Steering Committee is the executive body of the IIPC, currently comprising 15 member organisations. This year six seats are up for election/re-election. In response to the call for nominations to serve on the IIPC Steering Committee for a term commencing 1 June 2020, nine IIPC member organisations have put themselves forward:

An election will be held from 22 January to 14 February. The IIPC designated representatives from all member organisations will receive an email with instructions on how to vote. Each member will be asked to cast six votes. The representatives should ensure that they read all the nomination statements before casting their votes. The results of the vote will be announced on the Netpreserve blog and Members mailing list on 17 February. The first Steering Committee meeting will be held after the General Assembly in Montreal, on 14 May.

If you have any questions, please contact the IIPC Programme and Communications Officer.

Nomination statements in alphabetical order:

Biblioteca Nacional de España / National Library of Spain

The web archiving activity in Spain is under the scope of the Non-print Legal Deposit legislation in Spain. A collaborative network in Spain was built with the regional libraries to share with them the BNE infrastructure and help them afford their mandate of non-print legal deposit.

On the other hand, many countries in the world don’t preserve their webs yet, and probably many of them won’t be able to do it in the short or medium term. Among the Spanish-speaking countries, only Chile and Spain participate in the IIPC. The BNE thinks that the web archiving community has to turn their eyes to Latin American countries to get them involved in this preservation project and provide them support and advice to preserve their online documentary heritage. The social changes and political events that recently arose in some of these countries urge us to focus on this need.

The BNE is convinced that only with cooperation the heritage institutions will be able to afford the challenge of preserving the online information. This is also the basis the IIPC was created on.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

We the people behind web archiving at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina love a big data computing challenge. We recognize the significance of the web as an evolution of the media where heritage is inscribed and the responsibility to preserve it similar to how books and papyrus were preserved. Preserving heritage is properly done only when curatorial expertise is coupled with the right technology. Having a strong IT, we believe we have something to bring to the IIPC when it comes to how we as a collective apply technology towards achieving our goals. We believe there is much to be done with the archived web to unlock its potential. Towards that, BA is kicking off in partnership with NLNZ project LinkGate for scalable web archive visualization, leveraging previous experience in big data and combining that with the involvement of the research community to build a tool for researchers. Besides technology, BA believes it possibly has the opportunity to bring forth the topic of web archiving in the Arab/Africa region and to generally represent the IIPC outside the consortium’s usual perimeter and has, for instance, recently delivered a talk about the IIPC at the UNESCO Memory of the World conference.

Columbia University Libraries

The respective mission statements of IIPC and Columbia University both commit to advancing knowledge through global exchange. Columbia University Libraries has been building openly accessible thematic web archive collections since 2008 and serves as the administrative home for the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s collaborative web collecting program.

Columbia has benefited greatly from the expertise of the IIPC web archiving community, in direct proportion to our increasing engagement with IIPC collaborative work. From co-founding the Content Development Group, serving on the Program Committees for the conferences in Reykjavik, London, Wellington and Zagreb, to completing our first Steering Committee term (including work on the P&O portfolio and hosting a SC meeting in New York City), Columbia has been an active contributor to the IIPC.

The CDG’s Collaborative Collections initiative has through the efforts of participants from over 30 different member institutions produced rich multilingual and multinational collections. In pursuing a new term on the Steering Committee, Columbia aspires to continue supporting this and other engagement opportunities while helping shape the upcoming Consortium renewal and advocating for the IIPC to leverage its reserve funds to hire added staff to reduce our current dependence on volunteer work and better advance our challenging goals.

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek / German National Library

The German National Library (DNB) is a member of the IIPC since 2007. Its web archive started in 2012. The selective workflow is based on a co-operation with the service provider oia and does not include the common open source tools. Web archiving and the collection of digital publications (eBooks, eJournals, etc.) are part of the German legal deposit. There are ongoing co-operations with German state libraries and web archives.

Digital preservation is an important topic for the German National Library. DNB is active in this community and uses migration and emulation for digital collections. As co-lead of the IIPC Preservation Working Group DNB has been working for many years on bringing preservation aspects to the web archiving community.

In the IIPC Steering Committee DNB wants to help bringing together the communities of digital preservation and web archiving. DNB also wants to represent the growing German web archiving activities and support outreach to a network of libraries and archives interested in web archiving.

Harvard Library

The Harvard Library would like to place itself into nomination for the IIPC Steering Committee. Harvard Library is one of the great research libraries of the world and has been involved in concentrated web archiving activities since 2006. While initially deploying a locally-developed infrastructure based upon the Heritrix/Lucene/Wayback open source stack, the Library transitioned its collecting activities to Archive-It in 2018. Web archiving is a core stewardship component of the Library’s born-digital initiatives, which embrace all materials necessary for superlative support of the University’s 21st century research, teaching, and learning mission. Issues of current Library concern include training, restricted website capture, integration with Library discovery systems, economic sustainability, and collections-as-data. Active thematic collecting spans administrative records and scholarly disciplines across the arts, sciences, and humanities. Harvard is also a founding member of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and participates significantly in its collaborative web collection building, including a pilot project investigating the use of LOCKSS for long-term preservation. The IIPC is the premier forum for effective advocacy, outreach, training, and innovation in the field and Harvard welcomes the opportunity to bring its perspective as a research-intensive University to advancing the work of the organization and the broader community.

Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada

LAC as the national Archives and National Library of Canada has a legal mandate to collect Internet resources of Canada. To that end LAC has had a web harvesting program for many years, and is now putting greater and sustained emphasis on Canadian internet preservation. ‎

As part of its work on the Steering Committee LAC will continue to work to expand participation into under-represented regions of the Americas and Asia, two important communities that need to be engaged in Internet preservation, and from which we can learn from. Through its participation in both the archival and library communities at the national and international level, LAC will work to increase the knowledge and understanding of the importance of internet preservation and the value of participating in a global consortium dedicated to such activities.

LAC looks forward to continued success of the IIPC’s activities, and is pleased to support Bibliothèque et archives national du Québec as the Canadian hosts of the Steering Committee and the General Assembly in Montreal in May 2020.

Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library

The Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has a long-standing history of research and development efforts related to web archiving. Most notably, members of the Prototyping Team have devised the Memento Framework (RFC 7089) and implemented the Time Travel service, a federated search that enables the discovery of archived snapshots in more than 25 web archives simultaneously. The team further developed the Memento for Chrome and Memento for Firefox browser extensions that, based on Memento infrastructure, allow browsing web links back in time. Other related efforts aim at the adoption of Memento for popular Content Management Systems such as MediaWiki systems and research into the phenomenon of reference rot in scholarly communication. Most recently, the Prototyping Team has developed Memento Tracer, a novel web archiving framework that aims to find a balance between scalability and web archival quality.

The LANL Research Library is looking to bring this expertise and experience to the IIPC Steering Committee and, if elected, will focus on the promotion and adoption of web archival standards, collaborative tool development to further enable research of web archives’ holdings, and sustainability efforts of software projects by and for the community.

Nacionalna i Sveučilišna Knjižnica u Zagrebu / National and University Library of Croatia

The National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) is an IIPC member since 2008, and has been involved in activities regarding web archiving for over than 15 years. NSK started to archive the web selectively in 2004 and developed the Croatian Web Archive (HAW). Now, the HAW is combining three approaches and two different software to archive the web: selective archiving, since 2011 annual (.hr) domain harvesting and creating thematic collections of important Croatian events or themes. To secure permanent access to archived web resources, we are assigning persistent identifier URN:NBN to archived titles and instances. Majority of the content in HAW is in open access. We are active in training and organising workshops to introduce the web archiving to library professionals and students. We were honoured to host the IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference in 2019.

If elected in Steering Committee, we will be happy to share our experience with IIPC community and especially help in the field of training and metadata, building new collections and supporting open access and researchers’ needs.

Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek / Swiss National Library

The Swiss National Library started building Web Archive Switzerland in 2008. The full-text searchable archive enhanced by IIIF-generated screenshots, is integrated in e-Helvetica, the access system to the entire digital collection. The archived versions of websites can only be viewed in the reading rooms of the Swiss National Library and in over 30 partner libraries that contribute to this archive. However, the metadata of the archived versions are openly accessible.

Since joining the IIPC Steering Committee in 2013, the Swiss National Library has served in a variety of roles including Vice-Chair (2014), Chair (2019), and Portfolio Lead (since 2016). In order to ensure continuity in the work on the new Consortium Agreement, the Swiss National Library’s representative, Hansueli Locher, is making himself available to continue to lead the Strategic Decisions Task Group in 2020.

In the opinion of the Swiss National Library the IIPC consortium should serve as a technologically well aligned competence centre for web archiving. In concrete terms, this means a forward-oriented strategy with anticipation of future developments (e.g. related tools, preservation practices, metadata, big data) as well as cooperation or partnership with R & D entities and other organizations working in the field of web archiving.