If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that the task I set out for myself this week was to devise a way to describe web archives using the tools available to me: Archivists’ Toolkit, Archive-It, DACS and EAD. My goals were both practical and philosophical: to create useful description, but also to bring archival principles to bear on the practice of web archiving in a way that is sometimes absent in discussions on the topic. And you may have seen that I was less than entirely successful.
Appropriate to the scope of my goals, the problems I encountered were also both practical and philosophical in nature:
- I was simply dissatisfied with the options that my tools offered for recording information about web archives. There were a lot of “yeah, it kind of makes sense to put it in that field, but it could also go over here, and neither are a perfect fit” moments that I’m sure anyone doing this work has encountered. A Web Archiving Roundtable/TS-DACS white paper recommending best practices in this area would be fantastic, and may become reality.
- More fundamentally, though, I came to understand that the units of arrangement, description and access typically used in web archives simply don’t map well onto traditional archival units of arrangement and description, particularly if one is concerned with preserving information about the creation of the archive itself, i.e., provenance.
Continue reading: Chaos —> Order | Archival Description for Web Archives