The California Digital Library (CDL) and the UC Libraries are partnering with Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service. In the coming year, CDL’s Web Archiving Service (WAS) collections and all core infrastructure activities, i.e., crawling, indexing, search, display, and storage, will be transferred to Archive-It. This new partnership will allow the CDL to meet its mission and goals more efficiently and effectively and provide a robust solution for stakeholders.
The constantly changing and ever-increasing complexity of the web poses significant challenges to the current web archiving toolset and requires frequent upgrades to stay ahead. It became clear that there was a significant opportunity cost to maintaining WAS, which would not leave CDL with the capacity to develop new added-value web archiving services, such as tools for researchers, computational analysis of aggregated archival corpora, or work toward integrating web archives with other format types.
In 2014, the CDL held a series of meetings with peer institutions to investigate the possibility of collaborating on web archiving solutions. Enlisting the services of Archive-It was the most efficient solution because it will permit the CDL and its partners to reallocate their local resources to activities through which they can uniquely add stakeholder value to the baseline function provided by Archive-It.
The CDL is currently exploring opportunities with Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, and others to work closely with Archive-It to create an expanded roster of added-value tools and services.
