A Permanent Collection for a Digital World
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 5/12/2006
Archiving Web sites is often a difficult task. Storage space can be expensive, not to mention the problem of capturing sites that are constantly changing by the day—if not by the minute.
A new service, dubbed Archive-It, (www.archive-it.org) lets institutions crawl through the Web capturing millions of sites and storing them in up to three collections for $10,000 a year. The program has been so successful that a newer version of their archiving technology came out this month to attract smaller institutions like libraries, for a lower fee.
An offshoot of the 10-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive (www.archive.org), based in San Francisco, Archive-It has already signed up 10 clients including the Library of Virginia and the North Carolina State Archives since launching last fall. And several more should be on board by this summer, according to Kristine Hanna, Archive-It’s program director.
While the nonprofit is focusing on state archives and university libraries to start, they hope to turn their attention to the K–12 market soon. In the meantime, students are encouraged to use the online archives, which are free to anyone with an Internet connection, says Hanna.
Once on the site, users can choose from the available collections, including one on Hurricane Katrina. After a collection is selected, the site retrieves links, similar to search engine results, to Web sites that have been cached in the archives.
When Archive-It reaches the public-school market, media specialists may want to maintain control over what their students decide to save. It’s not hard to imagine a high school senior wanting to create a permanent record of, say, their MySpace page. But as anyone who has revisited their high school yearbook can attest, some things are perhaps better lost to cyberspace.
