NDIIPP Partners Come to Washington
The partners in the Library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) have been coming to Washington to meet since January 2005, when they held the first of their semiannual get-togethers. They came again this year, albeit in June, and this time they not only held their meeting but also provided some public relations to attendees at the Annual Meeting of the American Library Association, who were also in Washington. A complete report and Webcast will soon be available on this site.
Web-Based Collection Plans Help Libraries Build Digital Collections
The California Digital Library's Web-at-Risk (external link) project is building a Web Archiving Service that will enable libraries to continue their historic roles of collection building in an environment where materials are increasingly available only on the World Wide Web. The California Digital Library has recently published a selection of Web Collection Plans (external link) that will help libraries build collections in the digital age.
Libraries have traditionally used collection plans to establish the scope of materials that form a coherent collection, but have only recently begun to systematically address collection plans for digital resources harvested from the World Wide Web. The Web-at-Risk project is bridging the gap between collection building in a print environment and a Web-published world with the development of collection plans for Web-based content.
Collection plans were created by the project's curators from several University of California campuses, the University of North Texas, New York University, Stanford University and the Arizona State Library. The plans were standardized through the use of two tools created as part of the project's assessment work led by the University of North Texas: a collection plan template and a companion set of guidelines. The template and guidelines are examples of tools the project is developing to enable librarians and archivists to capture, curate, preserve and provide access to Web-based government and political information.
The template compiles information on a collection's subject, theme or event and also addresses issues more directly related to the harvesting of materials from the World Wide Web, such as the development of a "seed list" (a list of Web addresses that will be harvested for the collection); the "frequency of capture" (how often the Web-based materials will be harvested); and a section of the template related to how the library deals with interactive or dynamic content (password-protected materials or Web pages that are created on-the-fly).
The curators' collection plans will help the Web-at-Risk project continually refine collection development tools built around the California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service. WAS consists of new software services and tools that will help curators build, manage and explore collections of materials captured from the World Wide Web.
