A partnership between the CDL, Harvard Library, and UCLA Library has been awarded funding from IMLS to create Cobweb, a collaborative collection development platform for web archiving, https://github.com/CobwebOrg/cobweb.
The demands of archiving the web in comprehensive breadth or thematic depth easily exceed the technical and financial capacity of any single institution. To ensure that the limited resources of archiving programs are deployed most effectively, it is important that their curators know something about the collection development priorities and holdings of other, similarly-engaged institutions. Cobweb will meet this need by supporting three key functions - nominating, claiming, and holdings. The nomination function will let curators and stakeholders suggest web sites pertinent to specific thematic areas; the claiming function will allow archival programs to indicate an intention to capture some subset of nominated sites; and the holdings function will allow programs to document sites that have actually been captured.
Cobweb will help libraries and archives make better informed decisions regarding the allocation of their individual programmatic resources, and promote more effective institutional collaboration and sharing.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
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