Online/Virtual Event

Tuesday, April 20th 2021 from 11:00am to 12:00pm

See a recording of this webinar here.

Hear from two leading voices in the web archiving world. Alex Thurman (Columbia University Libraries) and Sumitra Duncan (New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)) share lessons learned from the point of view of established web archives. Sumitra is also be joined by a former NYARC Web Archiving Fellow, Meghan Lyon, who is currently Librarian-in-Residence on the Web Archiving Team, Digital Content Management Section at the Library of Congress.

Alex Thurman builds thematic and institutional web collections at Columbia University Libraries, where he is the Web Resources Collection Coordinator. Alex will describe the origins and development of Columbia’s web collecting program and provide overviews of its major web collections and its participation in separate collaborative web collecting initiatives with the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). His presentation will conclude by examining some special demands and considerations of maintaining large, long-lived, and open-ended thematic web collections, via case studies of Columbia’s Human Rights collection and the evolution of its New York City Places & Spaces collection.

Sumitra Duncan serves as Head of Web Archiving for the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC). NYARC is an institutional partnership between the libraries and archives at The Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Sumitra will cover how NYARC got started with web archiving as well as goals that have evolved over time. NYARC’s robust web collecting program includes several large web archives, but given their emphasis on training and rigorous quality assurance (QA) testing, the quality (e.g. similarity to the original) of what is collected is as notable as the quantity gathered. 

NYARC’s program contributors have also partnered via multiple collaborations, outreach to potential users of web archives and a respected ongoing internship program. Meghan Lyon will provide her perspective as a newer web archivist who has benefitted from training via NYARC’s program.