The Steering Committee, composed of no more than fifteen Member Institutions, provides oversight of the Consortium and defines and oversees its strategy. This year five seats are up for election/re-election. In response to the call for nominations to serve on the IIPC Steering Committee for a three-year term commencing 1 January 2023, 6 IIPC member organisations have put themselves forward:
An election is held from 15 September to 15 October. 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 five votes. The representatives should ensure that they read all of the nomination statements before casting their votes. The results of the vote will be announced on the Netpreserve blog and Members mailing list on 18 October. The first Steering Committee meeting in 2023 will be held online.
If you have any questions, please contact the IIPC Senior Program Officer.
Nomination statements in alphabetical order:
Internet Archive seeks to continue its role on the IIPC Steering Committee. As the oldest and largest publicly-available web archive in the world, a founding member of the IIPC, and a creator of many of the core technologies used in web archiving, Internet Archive plays a key role in fostering broad community participation in preserving and providing access to the web-published records that document our shared cultural heritage. Internet Archive has long served on the Steering Committee, including as Chair, and has helped establish IIPC’s relationship with CLIR, the Discretionary Funding Program, the IIPC Training Program, and other initiatives. By continuing on the Steering Committee, Internet Archive will advance these and similar programs to expand and diversify IIPC membership, further knowledge sharing and skills development, ensure the impact and sustainability of the organization, and help build collaborative frameworks that allow members to work together. The web can only be preserved through broad-based, multi-institutional efforts. Internet Archive looks to continue its role on the Steering Committee in order to bring our capacity and expertise to support both the mission of the IIPC and the shared mission of the larger community working to preserve and provide access to the archived web.
The National and University Library of Iceland is interested in serving another term on the IIPC Steering Committee. The library has had an active web archiving effort for nearly two decades. Our participation in the IIPC has been instrumental in its success.
As one of the IIPC‘s smaller members, we are keenly aware of the importance of collaboration to this specialized endeavor. The knowledge and tools that this community has given us access to are priceless.
We believe that in this community, active engagement ultimately brings the greatest rewards. As such, we have participated in projects, including Heritrix, OpenWayback and, most recently, PyWb. We have hosted several IIPC events, including the 2016 GA/WAC. We have also provided leadership in various areas including in working groups and the tools development portfolio, and our SC representative currently serves as the IIPC’s Steering Committee Chair.
If re-elected to the SC, we will aim to continue on in the same spirit.
The Library of Congress (LC) has been involved in web archiving for over 22 years and is a founding member of the IIPC. LC has worked collaboratively with international organizations on collections, tools and workflows, while developing in-house expertise enabling the collection and management at scale of over 3.3 petabytes of web content. LC has served in a variety of IIPC leadership roles, currently as vice-chair of the IIPC, and as chair in 2021. Roles also include Membership Engagement portfolio lead and Training WG co-chair. Staff participate actively in a variety of technical discussions, workshops, working groups, and member calls, and in 2022 LC co-hosted the WAC/GA. As a Steering Committee member, LC helped secure a new fiscal agent and helped hire and onboard new IIPC staff. If re-elected, we will continue to focus on increasing engagement of all members, enabling use of member benefits by all members. We will continue to actively participate in discussions around the best use of IIPC funding to support staff, projects, and events that will enable us all to work more efficiently and collaboratively as a community and to help strengthen ties to the researcher and wider web archiving community in the coming years.
The National Library of Australia was a founding IIPC member and Steering Committee member until 2009, hosting the second general assembly in Canberra in 2008. The NLA was re-elected in 2019 and filled the vice-chair role in 2020. Long engagement with the international web archiving community includes organizing one of the first major international conferences on web archiving in 2004. The NLA is currently active within the IIPC Tools Portfolio and was involved with two recent IIPC discretionary funded projects.
The NLA strengths include experience, operational maturity and a pragmatic approach to web archiving. Its web archiving program, established in 1996, embraces selective, domain and bulk collecting methods and now holds around 700 TBs or 15 billion URL snapshots. With a self-described ‘radical incrementalism’ approach, the NLA has a record of agile innovation, from building the first selective web archiving workflow system to the ‘outbackCDX’ tool providing efficiency for managing CDX indexes. The NLA is committed to open access, maintaining the entire Australian Web Archive as fully accessible and searchable though the Trove discovery service. In seeking re-election, the NLA aims to offer the Steering Committee long web archiving experience, proven practical engagement, and a unique Australasian, Southern Hemisphere perspective.
National Library of New Zealand has been an IIPC member since 2007, started web archiving in 1999, and appointed a dedicated web archiving role in 2017. The Library’s recent IIPC activities include:
- Host of the 2018 IIPC GA/WAC and the ‘What do researchers want’ workshop; Member of the 2022 WAC Programme Committee
- Co-chair of the Research WG; Participation in OHSOS sessions, the IIPC Strategic Direction Group, the CDG’s collaborative collections, and social media collecting webinars
- Project partner on ‘Asking questions with web archives’ and ‘LinkGate’; A project lead on ‘Browser-based crawling system for all’
The Library also co-develops the open source Web Curator Tool with National Library of Netherlands and shares updates at IIPC conferences.
The Library’s current web archiving priorities align closely with the IIPC Strategic Plan 2021-2025:
- Full-text search and improved access to our web archives
- Policies that allow us to provide greater access to our web archives
- Social media collecting
Our experimentation in these areas helps the IIPC achieve its strategic objectives, by demonstrating to other IIPC member organisations how to build capacity in these areas, and by collaborating with other IIPC members in these areas.
The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries expresses its interest in being elected to the IIPC Steering Committee. As a library that serves a population of 40,000+ students and faculty, we are committed to providing a wide range of resources and services to our users. Of these services we feel that the preservation of and access to Web archives is an important component.
The UNT Libraries has been a member of the IIPC since 2007 and has served in several capacities, including 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 as co-lead on the Browser-Based Crawler project.
The UNT Libraries is interested in helping the IIPC move forward into the future. We have an interest in representing the unique needs and concerns of research libraries as well as continuing to support the needs of other IIPC member institutions. If elected, the UNT Libraries will strive to represent the best interests of the IIPC community and to help move forward the preservation of the Web.
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