CATCH meeting: keynotes

Keynotes - titles and abstracts

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Web archiving and scholarly use of web archives / Helen Hockx-Yu, British Library

This talk will give a general overview of how web archives are used and focus on the British Library operated UK Web Archive, how often it is used and what scholars think of it (based on survey data). It will introduce the various access methods developed by the British Library to encourage scholarly use of archived websites, not only as historical documents but also as datasets for analytics and visualisation. It will also cover the challenges of archiving social media and give an overview of the how limited this is done for the UK Web Archive. Furthermore, it will introduce Twittervane, an application which is capable of collecting and analysing Twitter feeds and outputs URLs mentioned in the Tweets. These URLs shared on the Twitter could potentially point to web resources relevant to web archive collections.

Helen Hockx-Yu is head of Web archiving at the British Library. She is responsible for the ongoing Web Archiving activities of the British Library, leading a team of Web archivists and technologists to archive and preserve the UK Web in collaboration with other key UK and international organisations.

This is Where We Draw the Line! / Bernhard Rieder, University of Amsterdam

While often pursuing diverging goals, Internet researchers and archivists are facing similar challenges when engaging the Web and, in particular, Social Networking Services. These challenges link scholarly questions of corpus- and collection-building with technical and often legal and ethical questions that are in many ways dissimilar from the issues encountered in the past. This talk will focus on the Twitter microblogging service and discuss the difficulties posed by a global and increasingly algorithmic medium, as well as the networked contents it enables. I will argue that the problem of demarcation is particularly thorny and detail a number of strategies to approach it conceptually and practically.

Bernhard Rieder is Assistant Professor in New Media at the Mediastudies department at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Digital Methods Initiative. His work centers on the role of algorithms in the production of knowledge and aims at combining critical analysis of existing techniques and systems with active engagement in the design of tools and methods for Internet research. He maintains a blog at http://thepoliticsofsystems.net.

Guiding the Stewardship of Big--Really Big--Digital Collections  / William LeFurgy, Library of Congress

Libraries, archives and other cultural heritage organizations are now facing a conundrum in connection with content that is born digitally on the web. The value of this content for research is apparent, and institutions are increasingly aware of a responsibility to add it to their collections. But preserving digital content requires an infrastructure that is fundamentally different than that used for decades to manage traditional varieties of cultural heritage resources. Implementing the needed skills, tools and practices for collecting and managing digital collections at huge scale requires a new framework of institutional guidelines. This presentation will offer some thoughts on what this framework should look like and describe the major factors that influence its development.

Bill LeFurgy is Digital Initiatives Program Manager at the Library of Congress. He has worked for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress since June 2002. He leads the NDIIPP Communications Team, which interacts with a broad range of people interested in preserving access to digital information. 

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