This page identifies the scope of Yale University’s web archiving initiatives and the tools used by its staff. To date, these initiatives have included projects undertaken as Ivy Plus initiatives, unit-level use of the Archive-It service, work of the University Web Archiving Working Group, and various collaborations with partners both within and beyond Yale University.

• Web Archiving Working Group
  The University-wide Web Archiving Working Group (WAWG) was established in 2015 to support web archiving activities at Yale. The Working Group’s charge is to coordinate web archiving activities at Yale University, including website harvesting, description of the archived web content, development of access methods, preservation, and management of rights issues. During its first year of work, the Web Archiving Working Group produced a three-year strategic plan for web archiving at Yale and began work to implement that plan.
   
• Web Archiving Community of Practice (WA-CP)
  The Web Archiving Working Group is currently developing a Community of Practice (WA-CP). The goal of the WA-CP is to engage and support practitioners in meeting their web archiving goals as well as to provide educational opportunities through the exchange of case studies and best practices. The WA-CP aspires to use this “grass roots” approach to better understand the state of web archiving in our communities in order to promote sustainable practices. 
   
• Manuscripts and Archives Capture University Sites
  Manuscripts and Archives used HTTrack, an open source website copier utility, from 2004 to 2008 to capture University sites that were being removed.
   
• Web Archiving the 2015 Nepal Earthquake
  Assisted by Archive-It, Columbia University Library, Yale University Library, and the Bodleian Library worked to select web and social media sites for archiving in the wake of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. The collection focused on the capture of non-US sites in the days immediately following the natural disaster.
   
• Lillian Goldman Law Library Perma.cc Partnership
  The Yale Lillian Goldman Law Library promotes and administers Perma.cc for the Yale Law School. Overseen by the Harvard Law Library, this service allows users to identify linked websites found in scholarly journals for digital preservation, thus preventing “link rot” for legal citations.
   
• Yale Community Voices Archive
  The Yale Community Voices Archive captures digital materials, including web and social media sites, related to student discussions of race, ethnicity, and social justice at Yale. The Omeka-based project was developed in 2016 by the Yale University Library Digital Humanities Lab in partnership with Manuscripts and Archives.
   
• Web Archiving and Digital Preservation
  Yale University Library’s digital preservation system (Preservica), has the capability to capture and preserve web content. For more information, see Digital Preservation at Yale University Library.

Yale University Library participates in the Ivy Plus Libraries Web Collecting Program. Ivy Plus institutions have proposed to collaboratively collect and preserve web resources of scholarly interest. They have also sought to provide collective financial support for this purpose, including funding for staff resources and an Archive-It subscription for Ivy Plus collections. 

Yale Library staff have participated in the development of several collaborative collections through Ivy Plus, including:

• Collective Architecture and Design Response to Covid-19
  The Collective Architecture and Design Response to Covid-19 archive is an ongoing collaboration started in 2020 by librarians at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, to capture and preserve the responses of the architecture and design communities to the global pandemic.
   
• Queer Japan
  The Queer Japan Web Archiving Project was developed in 2019 by Japanese Studies librarians and researchers at several universities to archive web content from non-profit Japanese organizations that provide research, support, advocacy and services to the LGBTQ communities.
   
• Contemporary Composers Web Archive
  The Contemporary Composers Web Archive was begun in 2013 to capture and preserve the websites of contemporary composers. The project uses Archive-It to capture and provide access to crawled sites. The project is administered by Columbia University Libraries; Yale’s current involvement is as a selector through the Yale University Library’s Irving S. Gilmore Music Library
   
• The Collaborative Architecture, Urbanism, and Sustainability Web Archive 
  The Collaborative Architecture, Urbanism, and Sustainability Web Archive was created in 2014 to capture and preserve websites devoted to the topics of architecture, urban fabric, community development activism, public space and sustainability.

A list of departments currently using Yale University's Archive-It account:

• Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
• ITS
• Library IT
• Yale Center for British Art
• YUL/Manuscripts and Archives

For more information, contact Daniel Dollar (AUL for Collections, Preservation, and Digital Scholarship).