[Personal_archives] FW: FW: Web sites

Fri May 1 14:37:20 EDT 2009

While the new LAC Act did give us the right to crawl (but not give access) to web sites, this new authority arrived with absolutely no additional budget.  Between the cost problem, and the access problem, the initial acquisition was limited to government web sites.  This has been criticized, and LAC's recent Report on Planning and Priorities hints that this may change.  However, I know that the Electronic Publications program has found that obtaining permission to give access, web site by web site, and describing web sites is extremely time intensive (granted - not an approach widely emulated).  I doubt LAC would be politically willing to adopt the Internet Archive's strategy of putting a web site up without permission, and taking it down if there is a complaint.   

These crawling snapshots actually provide very poor coverage of internet activity, because of the small selection that is taken, the few number of layers/links which are taken and continue to function, and the small number of URL's included in any crawl (and Canada, in its telecommunications tradition, has one of the highest numbers of addresses in the .ca domain - or at least it did a few years ago).  I suspect that counting on crawling to provide any kind of "internet" coverage related to a person's fonds would be entirely serendipitous and random.

At the moment, an archivist's ability to find (still accessible) a representative chunk of a person's digital materials will probably depend, in large part, on when the decision to acquire is made.  The government side has learned that systems must be appraised much earlier in their lifecycle than in the past, that terms must be set identifying what, among the operational records is of interest to the archives, and more terms to protect the records while they remain in the department's custody and monitoring of those records until such time as they are transferred.  Obviously, none of this translates to our relations with private-sector donors, but all the technical and human problems leading to the government approach are strikingly similar.  

My interest in the advice we offer is not driven by a desire to make an archivist's life easier - it comes from the many contacts I have had with people who have lost digital objects that were terribly important to them (though I entirely grant Cathy's point about people subconsciously bringing on the crash to force the cull.  Roland Barthes wrote about the significance of the dresser drawer where we put artifacts until we detach ourselves from them emotionally, in preparation for throwing them away.

LAC had an open house a few years ago, where the public was invited to get advice on the preservation of audio-visual and digital materials.  For almost all of the visitors, nothing could be done.  And we heard stories describing every type of "loss" situation that Cathy has identified in her research, and a few more (including what happened when they took their records to badly trained charlatans making false promises about preservation).  I know we are currently waiting for the widow of a donor to ship us his computer, in a last ditch, desperate attempt to open some of his last artistic work - some of which the archivist believes is unique.  I think we need to distinguish between what we need to know to help us acquire records, and what we would like to offer potential donors as advice.  And these two sets of information must be appropriate to specific technical eras - another thing we learned on the government side is that strategies designed for ASCII databases do not translate well to the internet.

Thank you for letting me participate in this week's discussion - I can't believe how quickly it passed.  So many things to discuss, so little time.

My thanks to Catherine Hobbs for organizing this, and to Cathy Marshall for participating.  Your research and writings are crucial to what little understanding we have of what individual creators are doing with the computers, and out there in cyberspace, especially since InterPARES has moved back into organizational records for its third phase.

Yvette

Yvette Hackett
Archiviste de projet/Project Archivist
Dir. des archives canadiennes et collections spéciales/Canadian Archives and Special Collections Branch
Secteur de la collection du Patrimoine/Documentary Heritage Collection Sector
Bibliothèque et archives Canada/Library and Archives Canada
550, Place de la cité
Gatineau, Québec K1A 0N4
yvette.hackett at lac-bac.gc.ca
(819) 934-7383
Gouvernement du Canada/Government of Canada
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca <https://owa.lac-bac.gc.ca/exchange/www.collectionscanada.gc.ca> 

________________________________

From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu on behalf of Hobbs, Catherine
Sent: Thu 2009-04-30 9:00 AM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Personal_archives] FW: Web sites

Eh voilà.

> The Government of Canada Web Archive is a repository for the crawls we have done of the websites of the federal government of Canada
> http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/webarchives/index-e.html
>
> LAC's Electronic Collection houses the online monographs, serials and websites which have been collected.
> http://amicus.collectionscanada.gc.ca/electroniccollection-bin/Main/AdvSearch?coll=11&l=0&v=1
>
> This is an example of a website included in the Electronic Collection:
> http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/prime_minister-ef/index-2.html
> http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/prime_minister-ef/index.html
>
>
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