Learning to WALK: Building a National Web Archiving Collaborative Platform

Abstract

In the absence of a national web archiving strategy, Canadian governments, universities, and cultural heritage institutions have pursued disparate web archival collecting strategies. Carried out generally through contracts with the Internet Archive’s Archive-It services, these medium-sized collections (estimated around 30-35TBs) amount to a significant chunk of Canada’s born-digital cultural heritage since 2005. While there has been some collaboration between institutions, notably via the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) in western Canada, most web archiving collecting has been taking place in silos. Researchers seeking to use web archives in Canada are thus limited not only to the Archive-It search portal, but also to exploring on a silo-ed collection-by-collection basis. Given the growing importance of web archives for scholarly research, our project aims to break down silos and generate a common search portal and derivative dataset provider for web archiving research in Canada.