Archive-It

09-Dec-2009

Archive-It is a web site preservation program that allows institutions to select and permanently capture html-based web pages. The Iowa State University Library subscribes to the service for the University Archives. Created by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, the goal of Archive-It is to save born-digital information on web sites and to serve as a web archiving tool. It offers the ability to select, catalog, and provide public searching of collections of archived web sites. Web sites viewed through the Archive-It search interface are date-stamped and clearly identified as archived, to ensure that the content is seen in its proper historical context, and not confused with current versions of the same sites. Saving this information permanently documents how the university web site has changed over time, and preserving this information is a major goal of the University Archives and its effort to develop an electronic records program. It directly reflects the University Archives mission to collect and preserve historical information and records about the University. Archive-It is currently being utilized by a large number of repositories, including a number of Iowa State peers such as Indiana University, the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota.

A pilot project was conducted in the fall of 2007, and web sites from Extension, the Policy Library, and Student Organizations were selected in order to gain experience with the system. The system, while designed to work with html, can also preserve web displays utilizing text, pdfs, images, and multimedia, though it is sometimes unable to capture Java script or database driven sites. This service allows the Archives to select up to 12 million web pages. The subscription began in May 2008, and the first order of business was to capture, on a one-time crawl, the former web sites of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences and the College of Education. From there, the University Archives staff have been actively selecting and preserving the web sites of many of the University's colleges, departments, administrative units and student organizations.

For more information about Archive-It, see the vendor's FAQ and additional information at http://www.archive-it.org/. To see ISU's preserved web sites, please go to: http://www.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/collections/webarch.html.