Fwd: CRL, Four U.S. Universities to Undertake Political Web Archiving Investigation

[David Lewis]

>Delivered-To: H-AmIndian at h-net.msu.edu
>X-Sender: amind at mail.h-net.msu.edu
>
>October 28, 2002
>Contact: James Simon, 773-955-4545 Ext. 324
>The Center for Research Libraries
>6050 South Kenwood Ave
>Chicago, IL 60637
>Telephone ­ 800-621-6044
>Fax ­773-955-4339
>http://www.crl.edu
>
>Center for Research Libraries, Four U.S. Universities to Undertake
>Political Web Archiving Investigation under Mellon Foundation Funding. The
>Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded an investigation and planning
>effort, coordinated by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), on the
>preservation of Web-based political communications. The investigation is
>to help ensure long-term survival of the important documents and messages
>disseminated via the World Wide Web by non-governmental political
>organizations and groups. These materials comprise a valuable source of
>information for historical studies and the social sciences, but are by
>nature fugitive and susceptible to loss. The Mellon-funded investigation
>will lay the groundwork for the preservation of political Web content
>cooperatively by the research library community. Participating in the
>effort are four universities -- Cornell University, New York University,
>Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin ­ and the San
>Francisco-based Internet Archive. The grant awarded was in the amount of
>$445,000.
>
>Within the past decade the World Wide Web has emerged as a vital medium of
>political communication. It now serves political activists, parties,
>popular fronts, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a
>global message board through which to communicate with constituents and
>the world community. The Web provides a widely accessible and relatively
>unrestricted medium for rapid broadcast of information and public posting
>of critical documents such as manifestoes, constitutions, declarations,
>and treaties. Two notable examples of political Web communications are an
>on-line manifesto of the Liberation Army of the Free Papua Movement in
>Indonesia (http://www.eco-action.org/opm/); and the declaration of the
>state of Cabinda's independence from Angola by the territory's government
>in exile (http://www.cabinda.org/anglais.htm).
>
>These communications are the digital-era counterparts of the posters,
>pamphlets, and other forms of "street literature" that have long provided
>historians and policy analysts indispensable data on political activities
>and social and ideological trends. Despite their value such materials tend
>to be produced sporadically and to change and disappear rapidly. This
>fugitive character threatens their future availability as source materials
>for analysis and research.
>
>Deborah Jakubs, Chair of CRL's Area Studies Council and Director of
>Collections Services at Duke University Libraries, commented, "The new CRL
>effort to explore Web archiving of the documents of political groups in
>Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Western Europe is
>an exciting new initiative that will address longstanding issues of
>scholarly access to international 'grey literature' through the
>application of new technologies. The effort to preserve this very rich but
>largely ephemeral body of research materials directly addresses one of the
>key elements of the 'crisis in foreign acquisitions' identified in the
>1996 book Scholarship, Research Libraries and Global Publishing, by Jutta
>Reed-Scott. Scholars and librarians throughout the world will benefit from
>this ambitious new project."
>
>The CRL investigation will use Web communications produced by political
>groups in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Sub Saharan Africa and by
>radical organizations in Europe as a test bed of materials. The effort
>will produce a framework and general specifications for three aspects of
>ongoing, sustainable archiving:
>
>1. Long-term resource management ­ The organizational and economic
>framework necessary to support archiving, management, and preservation of
>Web political materials on an ongoing, cooperative basis.
>
>2. Curatorship -- The optimal curatorial regimes and practices for
>identification, targeting and capture of Web political communications to
>be archived.
>
>3. Technology -- The general technical requirements, specifications, and
>tools best suited to the capture and archiving of political
>communications. The project will build upon the investigations currently
>underway at the partner universities, the Internet Archive, and the
>Library of Congress, and will draw conclusions and identify methodologies
>that can be applied to the harvesting of similar materials from all
>regions.The project will be linked with a closely related investigation of
>the California Digital Library (CDL) that is also being supported by The
>Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The CDL project focus will be the capture and
>persistent management of a type of resource comparable to Web-based
>political communications - notably web-based materials produced or
>disseminated by US state and federal governments. Consultation among these
>efforts, pooling of expertise, and sharing of findings will ensure that
>the benefits of the investigations accrue to the larger scholarly research
>community and to the national preservation effort.
>
>The Center for Research Libraries will provide an organizational umbrella
>for the project, building upon its longstanding work in developing and
>preserving resources for humanities and social science research from all
>major regions of the world. Results of the investigation will be published
>to the Web by the Center at the close of the project term. During the
>investigation findings will also be reported periodically to members of
>the scholarly community through area and historical studies societies and
>at the American Historical Association meeting. For the library
>profession, progress and results will also be reported through the
>Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information,
>and other channels as appropriate. Founded in 1949, the Center for
>Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of North American universities,
>colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and
>preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional
>and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available
>to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.
>The Center's mission is to support advanced research and teaching in the
>humanities, sciences, and social sciences by ensuring the survival and
>availability of the knowledge resources vital to those activities. The
>Political Communications Web archiving initiative is part of the Center's
>continual effort to actively support the cooperative gathering and
>preservation of international materials in the digital realm.


David G. Lewis, M.A.
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
Department of Anthropology
University of Oregon