Originally, the following sections were meant to be included in this practicum report: rationale, archived content, access & preservation, best-practices, additional resources.
I intended to study archived websites and social media pages in relation to an overall digital preservation plan, and to make recommendations to that end. While the WARC format is the standard to preserve web-content, it might be overly complex for personal archives. The WARC itself is preservable: we can observe digital preservation protocol and store the WARC in several locations on different types of storage media (NDSA, 2019), but the process and workflow for maintaining web archives on a personal level is time consuming. Can the Webrecorder workflow be adapted by an artist for personal archiving, and should it be adapted? Link rot is evident in at least 4 areas of devinkenny.info. A simple practice moving forward would be to create archived versions of external links with the "Save Page Now" feature of Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and then link to the archived pages instead of resources on the live site. Another way to avoid link rot on an artists website would be to create PDFs for object such as reviews, gallery announcements, etc. and post those PDFs to the site instead of external links—doing so also makes the website more archivable for crawlers.
When collecting web archives for an individual creator, what do we think about access? Devin Kenny and I have decided to make the Devin Kenny Web Collection public, since the majority of the contents are already on the open web. What happens when some or all of that media is deleted from the live web?
There is a greater need for an artist social media as a web archiving case-study, using additional tools and with a larger and more specific timeline. Many of my captures have failed, and social media sites are frequently updating their security and bot restrictions, causing new hurdles for web crawler developers. There is extensive work to be done archiving social media, especially where resources are scarce.
Slania, H. (2013). Online Art Ephemera: Web archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 32(1), 112-126. DOI: 10.1086/669993. Retrieved from 069.074.060.218 on February 25, 2019.
This article characterizes websites as "online art ephemera", highlighting the impermanence of web-based materials that can be easy to overlook. The author also underlines the importance of capturing "dynamic content" in order to preserve/present a truly representative record. A chart, "Dynamic content archiving problems by severity of problem" illustrates the drawbacks of the technical complexity (Table 3, p. 122), some of which has been resolved over the past 7 years over the course of many reviews of Archive-It's tools and subsequent improvements to the software. This article positions web archiving in the larger field discussion around capturing electronic ephemera in archives.
Marshall, C. C. (2018, May). Biography, Ephemera, and the Future of Social Media Archiving. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 253-262). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3197026.3197051
This article addresses social media archiving in the context of literary biographical research, featuring the perspective of biographer as researcher and web archives user. Marshall contrasts the Internet Archive's approach to capturing the open web with capturing content from gated communities on the internet (i.e. Facebook) which contain personal “user-generated content”. Marshall highlights how user-generated content differs from "permanent material"; the potential for biographers to see "both sides of a correspondence" (imagine a manuscript collection of DMs?); and briefly touches on research focused on capturing algorithmic selection of social media platforms.
Deutch, S., & McKay, S. (2016). The Future of Artist Files: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 35(1), 27-42. DOI: 0730-7187/2016/3501-0002. Retrieved from 065.051.058.192 on April 01, 2020.
Ephemera associated with artists & artworks are increasingly born digital, i.e., an exhibition announcement that would have been disseminated as a postcard or broadside is now included as a text and image file in an email, or an event invite on social media. The authors explore obstacles associated with capturing, hosting, disseminating born-digital artist files. They discuss web archives as possible components of artist files, and question how to include in them in larger file collections.
Poursardar, Faryaneh, and Frank Shipman. "How perceptions of web resource boundaries differ for institutional and personal archives." 2018 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI). IEEE, 2018. DOI: 10.1109/IRI.2018.00026.
This article explores the differences between personal and institutional web resource archives. Includes quantitative data on the expectations of personal and institutional collectors regarding what would be included in an archive, such as pages beyond the home page, advertisements, links, images, and related content.
Pang, N., & Ng, J. (2017) Asian Film Archive’s journey in preserving social media as cultural knowledge. iPres poster session.
This brief poster session explores capture technologies used to archive the Asia Film Archive's Social media content from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.