The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) is comprised of three art research libraries affiliated with three major museums—the MoMA, Frick Collection, and Brooklyn Museum. NYARC is committed to improving discovery and access to art-historical content, exploring technological solutions to accessibility, and delivering high-quality research services. One component of this resource consortium is a robust web archiving program, which is designed to fulfill the scholarly and cultural missions the host institutions.
Web based resources have short, unpredictable life spans. NYARC web archives are subject-based collections developed to preserve research materials born on the web. These collections are captured primarily in Archive-It—a web archiving service developed by the Internet Archive. Archived websites are described in the library catalogue along other e-resources.
As one of two NYARC Web Archiving Fellows at the Frick Art Reference Library (FARL), I was responsible for the Quality Assurance (QA) process for The Frick Collection. The Frick Collection is comprised of the following main seed URLs, which are crawled on a monthly basis: http://www.frick.org/, https://instagram.com/frickcollection/, https://www.frickfuture.org/.
For a full glossary of web archiving terms used on this site, see Archive-It's Glossary of Archive-It and Web Archiving Terms.
During the spring semester, I developed a project to explore the use of web archiving technologies to preserve web-based materials for contemporary artists. In collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Devin Kenny, I created a web collection documenting web pages integral to Kenny's professional history. Kenny's practice includes performance, music, curation, sculpture, net art, and social media. I used Webrecorder to collect Kenny's website and social media pages. The Devin Kenny Web Collection can be seen here.
Kenny’s work was shown last summer in a solo exhibition at P.S.1, Devin Kenny: rootkits rootwork, which was been captured in NYARC’s monthly crawls of the MoMA website. Since Kenny’s work is included in the consortium’s collection, a crawl of his website was incorporated into NYARC’s Artist Websites collection. All auxiliary sites external to www.devinkenny.info were crawled independently with Webrecorder. In keeping with NYARC’s ethics of open access, this collection was be made publicly accessible.