Introduction
This workshop brings together the people who work on archiving and preserving information from the Web or created with Web technologies.
Traditional archives and libraries have been breaking ground and setting standards in this field, but they are far from the only stakeholders who capture, document, and preserve material from the web. Others, including community archivists, professional journalists, records managers, citizen journalists, self-archiving advocates, and fact checking organizations have also been stretching the bounds of what we can preserve, and how we can do so ethically, reliably, and scalably.
In this field, we can overlook neither the professional organizations who have been responsible for developing invaluable technical standards, nor the community archivists and citizen journalists who have been harnessing the democratizing power of the web to document in support of self-determination and decentralized history.
This workshop will involve position papers, panel discussions, breakout groups, and moderated group discussion.
Expected outcomes
The primary outcome expected from the workshop is new channels of communication between these disparate groups, and a plan to move forward to continue future work.
The workshop participants will initially define a scope for our work. Where do we draw the line in defining what a proper subject for “archiving” is? Do we include interactive and dynamic content, or content which varies depending on the technological context in which it’s viewed (e.g., search and recommendation engine results)? Datasets? Applications?
Our workshop participants will assemble a gap analysis among current standards and conversations. Some possible gaps might include a range of technical or communication problems, which might include such wide ranging problems such as missing technical requirements in existing specifications; the archival community’s needs that need to be better represented among the developers of the technological standards; the existing technological capabilities which need to be better communicated to various archiving communities; an increased need for communication between formal and informal archival communities around best practice.
The workshop participants will propose next steps for the group. Possible outcomes might include:
- A new W3C community group to continue the conversation
- Identifying a list of existing W3C Working Groups, Interest Groups, or Community Groups which would benefit from increased involvement from the archival community
- Outreach to archivists, librarians, community archivists, journalists, citizen journalists, and others who are archiving on the web
Workshop topics
The main topics of interest for this workshop include (but are not limited to) the following:
- The scope of our work (from documents to Web Applications to datasets to interactive content, where do we draw the line?)
- Preservation, discovery, and access
- Retention, copyright, licensing, and cultural ownership
- Metadata authorities and description
- Records management
- Self-archiving, community archiving, protecting cultural capital, and citizen journalism
- Defining the limits of a document, publication, or crawl
- Community archiving and self-determination
- Fraud, trust, provenance, verifiability, and fact-checking
- Self-archiving
- Backups, replication, and copying
- Embedded material, JavaScript, data sources, and other external dependencies
- Versioning and change notification
- File formats, format databases, and obsolete data
Who should attend
- Digital archivists, librarians, and records managers who have been pushing the boundaries of web-based technologies
- Community archivists and citizen journalists who have experience with the limits and potential of documenting and preserving on the web
- Creators of archival standards, including such concepts as preservation, discovery, rights management, metadata, etc.
- Creators of web specifications, especially those which might be used by document creators or by those preserving online content, including such things as HTML, metadata schemas, documenting rights management, understanding trusted authorities, etc.
- Other organizations involved in informal and formal preservation of information on the web.