We were happily surprised to have our Fisher Fine Arts Library web archive recognized by the Internet Archive's subscription service, Archive-It, as their "Collection of the Week."
Collection of the week: Fisher Fine Arts Library https://t.co/avUJ2HMEfI Philadelphia arts, design, and historic preservation sites.
— Archive-It (@archiveitorg) January 24, 2019
Learn more about partner @boriarchivista's #WebArchiving initiative at @upennlib: https://t.co/XlvEjVA691 pic.twitter.com/kvUQEPVBEq
This is great news as we start start the Spring semester!
At the Fisher Fine Arts Library we’ve started a pilot web archiving program to preserve the online art and historic preservation output being produced in Philadelphia. We partnered with the Internet Archive to “collect” the sites on a monthly basis using their Archive-It subscription service. Users can access the archived version of the websites from our collection page and via the Wayback Machine.
The websites we’re capturing consist of blogs, gallery sites, small museum websites, sites created for special exhibits, and online digital projects. We’re focusing on capturing vulnerable content from organizations or individuals that operate independently and on a small budget that probably don't have an IT team or an institutional repository.
Some of the sites are supported by small grants offered by the Philadelphia Cultural Trust Fund. A few are collaborative efforts between local institutions. However, most of the websites are created by individual artists or Philadelphians dedicated to documenting their city’s cultural heritage and contributing to its rich history in a meaningful way.
Currently, the archived content is described using DublinCore. In librarian-speak that means we’re using a flexible metadata standard meant to describe digital resources. However, in the future it would be great to include resources that would have been printed in the past, such as zines, booklets, and exhibit catalogs that are now "published" as websites, in Penn Libraries' Franklin catalog. That way patrons researching the Institute of Contemporary Art's programming (for example) would be able to find the archived ENDLESS SHOUT exhibit website along with other ICA resources in our library collection.
Our web archiving program is still in its first year. So far we’ve collected, described, and performed quality assurance on 25 sites. However, as scholarly and artistic output continues to migrate online, we at Fisher Fine Arts Library recognize the importance of collecting this content and are doing what we can to prevent Philly's online local history from disappearing, given the web's ephemeral nature.
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