Summary Report of the Needs Assessment Page: 15
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Summary Report of the Needs Assessment
stewardship for long-term preservation of government information when state agencies
often do not retain their materials beyond a short-term time period?
Librarians' concern for preservation and access to web-published materials of federal and
state agencies extends to regional and local government entities. Their need for assistance
in preservation of their web-published materials is quite high. Many participants thought
academic libraries were in a position to offer leadership, direction, and expertise to these
entities.
Expectations of Content Providers
It is clear that the variety of web-published materials, organizational mandates and
missions, and intellectual property concerns pose challenges for both content providers and
web archive providers. There appears to be no one-size-fits-all in terms of approaches and
agreements between these two parties. On the other hand, there are likely to be some one-
size-fits-many approaches that can be identified. For example, providers of union content
had much in common in their archival requirements with some state agencies.
Some content providers have long-standing relationships with archival organizations for
their print materials and clearly want to extend that relationship to include their web-
published materials. It is a matter of concern to them that agreements with web archive
providers are explicit in terms of what is to be archived and how the materials are to be
maintained. These content providers also think it is important that they retain intellectual
property rights to their material. Some are adamant that their web sites not be archived
without their express permission.
State government agencies are aware that their sites are already being crawled by the
Internet Archive as well as by Google, Yahoo, and other commercial entities. These agencies
put no additional effort into packaging their content for these organizations nor do they
establish agreements with them. The agencies have some concerns about their web-
published materials being captured, particularly if the information provider is reformatting
and repackaging captured materials. However, in the absence of formal agreements,
content providers recognize they have little control. These content providers do expect
"good harvest behavior" on the part of crawlers, for example, respecting robots.txt and not
impacting server performance.
A few agencies could envision a web archive as a safe back-up site for disaster recovery or
as a mirror site providing alternate access to their web sites. In either case, the archive
would be expected to provide equivalent operational access and functionality. These views
of an archive are more in line with management strategies for operational computer
systems. It seems funding challenges have prompted systems and project managers at
agencies to identify opportunities for effective risk management options beyond their own
organizations.
Most content providers share a view of a web archive as a safe repository for specific web-
published materials of historical value that are beyond the purview of providers' own
retention mandates or beyond their resource ability to preserve. From this perspective,
content providers see web archives as repositories for posterity that will enable research
into historical records for analysis of change over time.Kathleen Murray 15 June 18, 2006
15
Kathleen Murray
June 18, 2006
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Murray, Kathleen R. & Hsieh, Inga K. Summary Report of the Needs Assessment, report, June 18, 2006; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc33128/m1/18/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .