1. Web Archiving Service
(WAS)
Rosalie Lack
rosalie.lack@ucop.edu
Data Curation for Practitioners 2012 Workshop

2. Imagine a world …

3. This is our world …

4. WAS … is
A service of the UC Curation Center to
collect, manage, preserve and publish
websites and documents.

5. WAS Snapshot
53 public archives
120+ archives total
7,500+ sites
50+ TB
23 institutions

6. WAS Institutions
• Institute of Governmental Studies • Emory University Library
Library, UCB • Institute for Research on Labor and
• UC Berkeley Office of Public Affairs Employment
• UC Davis Libraries • New York University
• UC Irvine Libraries • Northwestern University Library
• UC Los Angeles Libraries • Purdue University
• UC Riverside Libraries • Stanford University Libraries
• UC San Diego Libraries • Temple University
• UC San Francisco Libraries • University of Arkansas Libraries
• UC Santa Barbara • University of Illinois at Urbana
• UC Santa Cruz McHenry Library Champaign Libraries
• University of Michigan, Bentley
Historical Library
• USDA Economic Research Service
• Water Resources Collections and
Archives

7. WAS Overview
A) Curator Tools

8. Curator Workflow

9. 1. Create Site
• Enter site name,
URL and description
• Scope
• Capture frequency
• Robots.txt

10. 2. Capture Sites

11. 3. View Captures
• View captures
• QA
• Compare

12. 4. Public Access
• Customize the
archive
• Write description
• Create custom
banner and icon

13. WAS Overview
B) Public Archives

14. Web Archive ‘home page’

15. Browse: Site List + Tags

16. Search: All Sites in an Archive

17. Integration with your Systems

18. How are people using WAS?

19. Institution’s website
• Preserve intuitional
history
• Capture university
news and events

20. Geographically focused

21. Topical
Support special
research collections

22. Event
• Sudden action
required
• May need many
selectors
• Start date / end date

23. Researcher’s Perspective
• Building collections for research
– Study the topic / event
– Study site change or web-based communication
– Websites are datasets for analysis and data
mining
• Preservation of research
– Archive grant-funded websites
– Selected sites
• Create stable citations for publications

24. Get started!
• Each library has WAS administrator(s)
• Unlimited number of curators per account
• What’s the cost?
– UC does not pay a service fee
– Storage only: $1040/per TB (average site is
$1.46/annually); storage costs to go down

25. Challenges
• Shared collection development
• Metadata issues
• Workflow and cost models for faculty
projects
• Time!
• Limitations of web crawlers
• Websites are messy

26. Contact me!
Rosalie Lack
WAS Service Manager
rosalie.lack@ucop.edu

27. Imagine a world …
“Imagine a world in which libraries and archives had
never existed. No institutions had ever systematically
collected or preserved our collective cultural past: every
book, letter, or document was created, read and then
immediately thrown away. What would we know about
our past?’’

28. This is our world …
“Yet, that is precisely what is happening with the web:
more and more of our daily lives occur within the digital
world, yet more than two decades after the birth of the
modern web, the “libraries” and “archives” of this world
are still just being formed.”
A Vision Of The Role And Future Of Web Archives
Kalev H. Leetaru, Graduate School of Library and Information Science,
University of Illinois. Presented as the keynote address at the 2012 IIPC
General Assembly in Washington, DC.
http://netpreserve.org/sites/default/files/resources/VisionRoles.pdf