University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Web Archives Workbench (WAW) Tool Suite: Taking an Archival Approach to the Preservation of Web Content

Hswe, Patricia; Kaczmarek, Joanne S.; Houser, Leah; Eke, Janet

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/13595

Description

Title
The Web Archives Workbench (WAW) Tool Suite: Taking an Archival Approach to the Preservation of Web Content
Author(s)
  • Hswe, Patricia
  • Kaczmarek, Joanne S.
  • Houser, Leah
  • Eke, Janet
Issue Date
2009
Keyword(s)
  • Digital preservation
  • National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP)
Abstract
The ECHO DEPository (also known as ECHO DEP, an abbreviation for Exploring Collaborations to Harvest Objects in a Digital Environment for Preservation) is an NDIIPP-partner project led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with OCLC and a consortium of partners, including five state libraries and archives. A core deliverable of the project’s first phase was OCLC’s development of the Web Archives Workbench (WAW), an opensource suite of Web archiving tools for identifying, describing, and harvesting Web-based content for ingestion into an external digital repository. Released in October 2007, the suite is designed to bridge the gap between manual selection and automated capture based on the “Arizona Model,” which applies a traditional aggregate-based archival approach to Web archiving. Aggregate-based archiving refers to archiving items by group or in series, rather than individually. Core functionality of the suite includes the ability to identify Web content of potential interest through crawls of “seed” URLs and the domains they link to; tools for creating and managing metadata for association with harvested objects; website structural analysis and visualization to aid human content selection decisions; and packaging using a PREMIS-based METS profile developed by the ECHO DEPository to support easier ingestion into multiple repositories. This article provides background on the Arizona Model; an overview of how the tools work and their technical implementation; and a brief summary of user feedback from testing and implementing the tools.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/13595
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Owning Collections

Library Trends 57 (3) Winter 2009: Library of Congress NDIIP Program PRIMARY
Library Trends 57 (3) Winter 2009: Library of Congress NDIIP Program. Edited by Patricia Cruse and Beth Sandore