The call for nominations for the 2023 Steering Committee (SC) elections has closed. We received five nominations for five vacant seats, so an election process for the SC is not required this year. We would like to congratulate and thank the members who will be continuing for another term (Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Library and Archives Canada, Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library and Swiss National Library) and also extend our congratulations to the newly elected member, University of North Texas Libraries. Please find the statements of all the nominees below. The new, three-year term starts on 1 January 2024.
Nomination statements:
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
We think deeply of web archiving at Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA). We see it as an extension of the tradition of knowledge preservation that traces back to the ancient library. Joining the IIPC in 2011, BA has been active in the area of tools, contributing to ideas including data deduplication in early years and, more recently, graph visualization, and has been working in collaboration with the IIPC Research Working Group and Content Development Working Group to republish the IIPC collections for researcher access hosted on BA infrastructure. On the Steering Committee, BA has been Tools Development Portfolio lead since 2021, working with IIPC colleagues to further the development of tools for playback and capture through facilitating the pywb and Browsertrix Cloud projects, respectively. Within the academic community, BA has been promoting web archiving as a software development and data analytics topic through its popular internship program. We believe technology such as AI and VR can be transformative to how web archives are used. BA has the pleasure of having its designated representative serving as the 2023 IIPC chair, and we eagerly look forward to continuing our journey together toward maximizing the potential of archives of the web as a knowledge resource.
Library and Archives Canada
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is interested in continuing its membership in the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s (IIPC) Steering Committee, which expires in 2023. LAC is a founding member of the IIPC, and has served as Chair, Vice-Chair, and Treasurer in the past. Throughout its current term, LAC has been active and has contributed to the Program Committee, and chaired sessions, at the annual conferences and at workshops (2019-present). LAC has a permanent and legislated web archiving program, demonstrating its commitment to preserving its national heritage on the web, and to the advancement of web archiving as an international digital curation-oriented discipline. While our program is not of the scale and technical complexity as others, our legislation, program management, policies and methodologies are well developed. It is in these areas LAC believes it can contribute best to the IIPC Steering Committee, leading recently to e.g., a workshop entitled “Web Archiving in a Program Management Context” to be held in October 2023. We look forward to contributing ideas and expertise for new content and workshops in the future!
Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library
LANL’s Research Library has a long-standing history of research and development efforts as well as tool development in the realm of web archiving. Most notably, members of the Prototyping Team in the library have devised the Memento Framework (RFC 7089) and implemented the Time Travel service, a system to search for archived snapshots across multiple web archives. The team has led and contributed to various research efforts, for example, a large-scale investigation into the phenomenon of link rot and content drift (reference rot) in scholarly communication and a recent analysis of the ineffectiveness of common hashes to verify fixity of replayed archived web resources. In addition, the team leads the ongoing development of Memento Tracer – a tool to support human-driven, scalable, and high-quality web archiving and contributes to the development of summarization and storytelling tools for web archive collections.
Following the institution’s representative tenure on the Steering Committee from 2020 – 2023, the we aim to continue to bring this expertise and experience to the SC. Our goal is to further promote the adoption of web archival standards, collaborative tool development to support research efforts based on web archives’ holdings, and sustainability efforts of software projects by and for the community.
Swiss National Library
The Swiss National Library (SNL) began building Web Archive Switzerland in 2008 and has been steadily expanding its collection ever since. It is currently replacing the entire long-term archiving environment and thus also the system components used for the Web Archive with a successor solution.
Since joining the IIPC Steering Committee, the SNL has held various roles, including the Chair 2019. The SNL representative also took over the leadership of the Strategic Decisions Working Group in 2020 to ensure continuity in the work on the Consortium Agreement. The SNL would very much like to continue supporting the implementation of the Strategic Plan by participating actively and is therefore running for another term of office.
In the opinion of the SNL IIPC’s greatest strength is its ability to bring together different communities of as well as researchers as well as practitioners and to provide easy access to the topic of web archiving. We also believe that the IIPC should continue to serve as a technologically well aligned competence center 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, artificial intelligence)
University of North Texas Libraries
The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries, serving 44,000+ students and faculty, is committed to providing a wide range of resources and services to our users. We feel that the preservation of and access to Web archives is an important component of these services. We crawl and serve content on locally hosted infrastructure and develop tools for working with WARCs. Members of the libraries offer a Web Archiving course in the College of Information and conduct grant-funded research with web archives.
An IIPC member since 2007, the UNT Libraries has served previous terms on the Steering Committee. Recently, members of the UNT Libraries have worked as co-chairs of the Tools Development Portfolio, on the Partnership and Outreach Portfolio, on the Discretionary Funding Program selection committee, on the WAC program committee, and on the Browser-Based Crawler project.
With an interest in supporting tools development, facilitating research with Web archives, preservation of archived material, and growing IIPC membership, the UNT Libraries wishes to serve on the Steering Committee. If elected, the UNT Libraries will represent the unique concerns of research libraries as well as continue to support the needs of other IIPC member institutions.
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