The integrity of research is at risk: Capturing and preserving web sites and web documents and the implications for resource sharing

The integrity of research is at risk: Capturing and preserving web sites and web documents and the implications for resource sharing

Born digital materials, for example websites and web documents, present particular challenges to academic and community libraries and their collection development, discovery and access, preservation, and resource sharing programs. This paper will explore the policy, workflow, legal, governance, financial, and service framework for capturing and preserving web content in the context of expanding collaborative collection development agreements among libraries. The paper will describe the program at the Columbia University Libraries in the area of Web Resources Archiving Collaboration. Columbia has sought to situate its program within the broader mission of its Libraries, collecting content deemed important for current and future research, preserving the content for future scholars, but also providing access in novel ways to foster current use in teaching and research. The Libraries’ program focuses on four main types of web resource collections: • Thematic collections of content relating to the University’s academic programs; • Web content from organizations and individuals whose archives are held by the Libraries; • Significant content from the University’s own website; • Sites identified by researchers and library subject specialists as at risk. The Columbia Libraries are developing and testing models for collaborative action in four areas: • Developing the policy, procedural, legal, governance and financial framework to enable Columbia to provide web archiving services for a group of libraries in support of existing collaborative collection development agreements; • Conducting a rigorous investigation of the use of web resources in 21st century scholarship in the area of human rights, and assessing what further development is needed in current web archiving efforts to support future needs in this area; • Working with web content-producing organizations to provide tools and techniques that optimize websites for harvesting and preservation and to develop complementary methods and procedures for direct transmission of content that cannot be readily harvested from the web; • Administering, through a multi-institutional advisory board, a series of competitive awards for innovative uses of web archives in research, and a second series of awards to support development of tools that facilitate the process of web archiving and/or the use of web archives.