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.