Please join the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group during ALA Annual Conference in Washington D.C. for a presentation and Q&A on the Library of Congress Web Archiving Program on Sunday, June 23, 2019, 9:00-10:00AM, Marriott Marquis, Archives Room during our regular scheduled meeting. The speakers are Rick Fitzgerald, Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate of the Library of Congress, and Grace Thomas, Digital Collections Specialist for the Library of Congress. We are looking forward to seeing you all in Washington, D.C. Be sure to add this event to your ALA Conference Scheduler.
The Library of Congress Web Archiving program, in existence since 2000, has had varying approaches over the years related to creating metadata records and making them accessible. While the program has been in a state of continuous evolution since its inception, the past six years have seen significant advancement in how the Library conceptualizes a web archive, and is therefore able to describe it.
This re-conceptualization was integral for assigning appropriate permissions to archived web content and indeed led to more accurate description. However, the implementation was part of an overall system migration and was lengthy, resulting in a backlog of over 4,000 undescribed, inaccessible web archives. Additionally, with the Library's 2017 Digital Collecting Plan, which calls for an expansion of web archiving, the Library's event and thematic web archive collections have only continued increasing in number, depth, and breadth.
Their talk will explain the recent history of web archives description at the Library of Congress, the process to implement a new model of description, outline the current model represented publicly as Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) records incorporated into the loc.gov Solr index, share the process and triumph of clearing the backlog, set our work among other institutions participating in web archiving and description of web archives, and finally look toward the future in describing research projects we hope will enhance our description.
Speaker Bios:
Rick Fitzgerald is a Librarian in the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate of the Library of Congress. He has been the primary cataloger for the Library of Congress Web Archives since 2010, and has taken an active role in many of its transitions over the past several years.
Grace Thomas became a Digital Collections Specialist for the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team in August 2016. Currently, many of her tasks revolve around streamlining ways to facilitate description of and access to resources in the Library's 1.7 petabyte web archive.
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Anna Neatrour
Digital Initiatives Librarian
University of Utah
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