13:30:26 And this this can be recorded so perfect. I just wanted to make sure I was on the docket with that.
13:30:33 All right.
13:30:35 It's showtime.
13:30:45 Alright.
13:30:58 Give it a little bit more for everyone to join him.
13:31:14 All right. Well, I think we should get started So good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to be here with us today.
13:31:23 My name is Steven Gentry and I'm the moderator for today's session, just so that you know that you're in the right place. This is the Zoom Room for crawling through current events, how web archivists document politics racial justice and coping 19.
13:31:37 It will focus on how on how archivists at the University of Virginia. The Schaumburg Center for Research and black culture Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine have documented or documenting these moments.
13:31:50 So our session is structured in three parts.
13:31:52 First our panelists, Karen McClurkin Zakiya Cali, Lisa worth timer and Christy Moffat will provide a brief introduction to themselves, as well as their web marketing efforts.
13:32:04 Afterwards we will have a moderated q amp a session overseen by myself. And then we will open up to questions from you all.
13:32:11 So there are just some other logistical things I want to cover real quick before we get started.
13:32:16 First we will be using the live transcript feature for this session for accessibility purposes. If you would like to hide the subtitles, simply click the live transcription button at the bottom of your application and select hide subtitle.
13:32:30 And if your zoom application is not maximized. You may need to click on the three dots or more icon to turn off the subtitles. And if you do, think of any questions you'd like to ask our panelists, please use the q amp a feature to pose questions to them.
13:32:44 I will relay those questions to them at the end the final part of our session.
13:32:50 So without further ado, let me share my screen.
13:32:59 And just to confirm carry you can carry you can see them. Yep.
13:33:05 Wonderful.
13:33:07 And take it away.
13:33:09 Do you want to move into presentation mode.
13:33:12 Okay.
13:33:13 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Karen McClurkin and I'll be talking about capturing web based content related to the University of Virginia, and our surrounding community.
13:33:21 Before we get started, I just wanted to say that some of the events I'll be talking about today, cover traumatic things while I won't be going into details, it's hard to talk about questions and ethics and workflows without acknowledging that there can
13:33:32 be an emotional toll to performing this work, and anyone embarking on these projects should consider that before they start it anytime our discussions make you uncomfortable or cause emotional distress.
13:33:43 I hope you will feel free to step away from our presentation.
13:33:47 Next slide please.
13:33:52 So as the director of preservation services for the UVA library, I'm responsible for the preservation of long term access of all of our collections in all formats.
13:34:01 So, on any given day I could be cleaning mold consulting on storage of architectural drawings, calling vendors to repair damaged equipment, writing policies, and yes, helping out with our web archiving program at both UVA and through the Society of American
13:34:13 archivists, I've been working on developing resources for documenting in times of crisis, and I currently serve as the co chair for essays crisis disaster and tragedy response Working Group.
13:34:36 Mostly I come to the panel today as an administrator. Now I have been working on collecting covered 19 web archives this past year, and I've served as the assistant Project Coordinator for the project.
13:34:28 I spent about four hours a week working on the project for the last year.
13:34:38 So who does web archiving UBA that really depends on the circumstances. So you can see from this slide.
13:34:45 I'm not part of the regular web archiving group. We currently have five folks who work on web archiving, but for all of them this is just a piece of what they do each day.
13:34:54 Next slide.
13:34:57 But when major events happen.
13:34:59 What does that require fast mobilization and extra staffing, a lot of us chip in. And so for the covered 19 web archiving project, we collaborated with our colleagues at the Health Sciences Library, which administrative Lee reports in a different part
13:35:12 of the university.
13:35:15 And actually they are the ones who coordinated across both libraries. It helped that we were working from home for most of the past year, which meant some of us had some time that we wouldn't normally have, because there are things we can only do on site,
13:35:27 and we weren't allowed to be on the site.
13:35:30 As we slowly start to get back to normal, and a staff have left the university. There is an ever decreasing number of folks working on this project.
13:35:39 Next slide.
13:35:42 So the tools we use very on the type of sites we're collecting our staffing resources at the time, the skills of those staff and the infrastructure of the unit who's coordinating the project.
13:35:52 So you'd be a library, which I work for we have an archive it subscription, and it's the tool that we usually use particularly for sites with static content, but for dynamic content, it doesn't always capture as well so something like web recorder might
13:36:06 work better.
13:36:07 When the Kobe 19 project first started the folks doing the captured us w get. But that requires some skills that not everyone had and so we shifted to web recorder because it has a really simple interface if you're just starting out, and that was the
13:36:19 easiest way for the large group to distribute the work.
13:36:23 Next slide please.
13:36:26 In addition to web archiving tools we use them on Google Forms to gather nominations from the public, as well as from staff folks, and Google Sheets to coordinate work particularly when we're working across libraries like we happen with the coded 19 projects.
13:36:41 Next slide.
13:36:45 And so in addition to covered 19 collecting I probably will talk about some of our other web archiving projects we've done BBA in 2014 for example, Rolling Stones publication of a riff on canvas, which detailed a group sexual assault rail the UVA community.
13:37:01 Although the article was eventually retracted the articles publication caused a moment of recognition within the UVA community documentation of the events that led to the retraction of the article and the response on grounds, as well as the lawsuits that
13:37:12 followed as a result of the publication, where the focus of the library's web collecting efforts for several years.
13:37:19 And on August, 11 and 12th 2017. The University of Virginia in the Charlottesville community was attacked by alt right nationalists who come to town for unite the right rally to protest removal of Confederate statutes statutes from some of our public
13:37:33 spaces.
13:37:34 By the time the weekend was over three people had died, and numerous people, including a member of our library staff sustained injuries that left permanent scars.
13:37:43 In both of these instances web archiving was part of a larger documentation effort of events that traumatized.
13:37:51 So that's a little bit about UVA and now I'm going to turn it off over to my colleague.
13:38:00 Okay. Hi everyone, I'm the Kia Collier, I am the digital archivist at the Schaumburg Center for Research and black culture, the part of the New York Public Library, and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about documenting code at night team specifically,
13:38:23 African diaspora and real experience of Kobe 19. Next slide please.
13:38:24 Okay, so I am the digital archivist at the shopping center and have a lot of responsibilities.
13:38:34 Primarily being web archiving instead of my primary responsibility but I'm working on a project called the hashtag Schonberg syllabus project, which uses web archiving to sort of document the hashtags a little this sort of movement that's been going on
13:38:50 the last six years with the sort of sharing of resource list and syllabi by to contextualize sort of incidents of state sanctioned violence, and has sort of expanded to the ways that communities are using filler by reading list to really just contextualize
13:39:09 things around them and share resources about things that they're interested in.
13:39:14 So really, that's the primary collection that I work on in terms of web archiving.
13:39:21 I sort of do research about that of what's going on in order to find, find the silver by.
13:39:31 I carry a collective describe them.
13:39:35 And then I also sort of work with multiple teams within New York Public Library at the Schaumburg center around born digital archival materials sort of thinking about our infrastructure and sort of processes and policy for foreign digital materials.
13:39:56 Next slide.
13:39:59 Okay. And so while my part of the primary collection that I work on is the hashtag syllabus collection which in itself takes off a lot of time, sort of,
13:40:15 one of the things that we value about having web archiving as the Schonberg center. And I should say I am the sole person doing web archiving so I am a team of one, which is, you know why my slides don't look like Cara's with multiple people's names,
13:40:33 it's just me.
13:40:34 So, sort of, one of the reasons that we are grateful to sort of have web archiving, which is, which comes from like our participation in the internet archives community web program for public libraries to sort of document their communities, is that we're
13:40:55 able to sort of, you know, tackle things as they happen, and as as sort of necessary to do so.
13:41:03 So starting in April of last year.
13:41:08 It became sort of readily apparent that you know I needed to shift my focus away from some of our other collections to covert 19, specifically as you know we were learning more and more about how cold it was disproportionately affecting black people and
13:41:29 black communities. And so, started a collection and sort of just like all right now what do I do and what do I collect you know there's just so many topics and so many different ways that the pandemic is sort of fascinating and how by people are experiencing
13:41:51 the pandemic and so sort of started like collaborating and speaking to other black memory workers and archivists to be like, this is, this is a lot you know where do I even start and also with some of my colleagues at the Schaumburg center to really sort
13:42:09 of scope.
13:42:25 All of this collecting and so we kind of started with the African dice morning experience broadly, and of course there's a lot of information about health disparities and they gloves and myths around the pandemic and so starting there, and then really
13:42:33 to kind of mirror. You know what, in our collections.
13:42:40 Physically, so looking at information about Harlem, which is where the Schaumburg centers located.
13:42:43 Black businesses and how they're being affected and online learning, and the mini shifts and adjustments that we've had to make, including being on zoom like we are now obituaries, and we have a, like a physical obituary collection at the Schaumburg Center,
13:43:02 which is not, you know, sort of, based in any specific health crisis, but wanting to mirror that we also have the physical restaurant menus and black religious institutions.
13:43:18 So really, you know, making sure that this collection kind of corresponds and as to sort of what the Schaumburg already collects also looking at sort of new cultural production and things that folks were creating during this time.
13:43:34 Mutual Aid responses and lots and lots of news articles.
13:43:43 x y z.
13:43:43 Some of the guiding principles that I tried to follow and what I've developed with sort of in conversation with other black memory workers is really thinking about documenting
13:43:57 the African diaspora and experience for accountability and thinking about the ways that this narrative of how black people were impacted during this time could be shifted and tried to be rewritten at some point in time, or you race and so really thinking
13:44:15 about the importance of having this documentation for accountability.
13:44:19 And because of that, just being really intentional about what's being added to the collection and sort of thinking, even though, you know, information is just sort of coming out.
13:44:33 hurriedly and it's changing you know sort of every moment, still really taking my time to.
13:44:42 First, I'm you know I'm living through the pandemic as well, and being graceful with myself. And then also, you know, being slow in order to check to kind of be intentional and sort of see what all is there, and also focus on accurate documentation.
13:45:03 So not to sort of have like the largest collection, or the most comprehensive but just like good information that can be used for and by the communities that the Schaumburg Center serves.
13:45:21 Next slide please.
13:45:22 And so this is just a screenshot of our homepage.
13:45:29 And for the covert 19 collection and archive it, which is the only tool that I'm using right now for this collection. And there are a total of 357 sites and necklaces.
13:45:43 And this is just, you know, screenshot of one of the sites that is included, which is a project based in Philadelphia, of the black doctors coven 19 Consortium.
13:46:01 Next slide please.
13:46:03 And here's another example of just an article that was written sort of about how someone like sort of research and and personally experienced
13:46:19 disease and health issues sort of as a black person.
13:46:24 Next slide.
13:46:27 And what is it so I am.
13:46:35 I don't know who's next but, um, so yes that's it.
13:46:41 Alright, good afternoon everyone.
13:46:43 My name is Melissa timer I am a music reference specialist at the Library of Congress, and I'm the music divisions web archives collection lead.
13:46:52 I'm going to present to you all today about coven 19 web archiving at the Library of Congress, and the thoughts and opinions are my own and do not represent those of the Library of Congress.
13:47:02 Next slide please.
13:47:06 So what do I do, like many of you out there, I wear a variety of hats on any given day, I provide reference services to a wide variety of congressional and international users about music and dance and theater.
13:47:19 And a lot of this reference work involves special collections.
13:47:23 I also create outreach and instruction initiatives, from writing research guides and blog posts to give them public lectures and research orientations and curating exhibits and show and tells and I apologize for the construction sounds in the background
13:47:37 that you will inevitably hear what you're getting a little right now.
13:47:41 For acquisitions and collection development, I primarily have a pre custodial function liaising with donors of materials and serving on a music division and acquisitions committee will be image in the lower right is actual footage of me working from home
13:47:58 during the pandemic. Just kidding, it's actually a really great photo owned by the Princeton Photographs Division from 1909 called good news I think we can all use some of that right now.
13:48:09 I began participating in web archiving in 2018 just a few months after I joined to the library.
13:48:16 This screenshot at the bottom of the slide is from our internal workflow tool and it shows the four collections that I administer and curate now represent all the special format divisions known as the Special Collections director it on the libraries web
13:48:32 web archive and collection development committee to review collection proposals and allocate resources.
13:48:53 Outside the library I'm the Vice Chair chair elect of the essay writing section and I'm also America mentor.
13:48:55 Next slide please.
13:48:55 So these are the three web archive collections I curate and manage for the music division and I may mention these during the panel session, the performing arts web archive contains web sites that share creators with our special collections and materials,
13:49:04 the LC commissioned composers web archive contains websites and social media of composers commissioned for new works with music division funds and I actually presented about this collection and Merrick Morgantown in 2019, and the professional organizations
13:49:21 for performing arts web archive documents the regional, national, and international networks and the performing arts including organizations for labor advocacy education performance business and scholarship.
13:49:34 Next slide please.
13:49:40 Next slide please. Thank you.
13:49:42 So my focus for today's panel is the coronavirus web archive, the screenshot you see here is going to be our digital collections landing page this is a preview.
13:49:52 This page will be live likely at the end of April.
13:49:56 So this collection contains representative web based content that documents the impact of response to the Kovac 19 pandemic on communities across the United States, with select international websites.
13:50:08 This collection was curated by subject specialists from across the library in order to present a multi disciplinary collection.
13:50:15 I was brought on to curate social and cultural content. And like many of my colleagues on the team I also selected websites outside of my subject area that I found on the web.
13:50:25 So, how did this collection come to be. Next slide please.
13:50:31 from mid March to June 2020 staff. You sent home teleworking and participation in web archiving skyrocketed into a general web archive, not a dedicated collection.
13:50:45 So in June 20, the coronavirus to have archives formal collecting plan was approved. And this was put together by the web archiving team at the Library of Congress which there are technologists who run the crawls and we use with the contractors who run
13:50:59 those calls, and they do the QA, And so, that formal collecting plan was approved and put under the management of the science technology business division and this was after discussions with our collection development office.
13:51:15 In July, I was appointed to a group with colleagues across the divisions to curate the collection, as well as determine the course of action for the thousands.
13:51:24 And I mean thousands of prior nominations from LC staff.
13:51:30 In August, 2020, I created an appraisal rubric for the team to uniformly and objectively address the backlog nominations as well as future ones.
13:51:39 And the biggest challenge was that our original collection limit was 250 new seeds 200 for us space content and 50 for international content.
13:51:51 And as of April 5 2021, there are 328 seeds crawling with 255 completed crawls, so the bottom of the slide has the names of my colleagues to recognize their invaluable work in both pre collection efforts and on the formal collecting team.
13:52:10 And there's also a blog posts at the bottom with more details about the timelines and challenges as well.
13:52:16 Next slide please.
13:52:19 So in addition to the wide variety of subject areas in the collection. It also has a variety of URLs and I like to think of them in three categories. The first is new websites that emerged during the pandemic specifically about it, and a screenshot example
13:52:35 here is an American organization called survivor core, and this was actually one of my nominations outside my subject area. Next slide please.
13:52:44 A second category is websites the library was already crawling and other collections that had new coronavirus content emerging. Sometimes it was just a page and the directory other times it was a subdomain, and in some cases content was deeper throughout
13:52:58 multiple sections of site. So we chose to add these deeper seed URLs to the coronavirus web archive on a case by case basis. So this example here is Pfizer inks page about their vaccine, and the root URL was already part of the business in America, web
13:53:13 archive. Next slide please.
13:53:16 Another category of websites are ones that already existed before the pandemic, but like the previous category had new relevant content either pages in the directory or sub domain.
13:53:27 So an example here is the website of the blues foundation with the senior URL being the page for the coven 19 blues musician Emergency Relief Fund.
13:53:38 Next slide please.
13:53:53 And here are just a few more screenshots of websites in the coronavirus web archive, and I look forward to the panel in a few minutes keep in touch.
13:53:56 Hello everyone, my name is Christy Moffitt. I'm an archivist at the National Library of Medicine which is part of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland.
13:54:05 I'm going to give a brief overview of our collecting around Covidien a team, and a bit about our program in general. Next slide please.
13:54:18 So web archiving it MLM is carried out by our web collecting and archiving Working Group.
13:54:25 Um, we're a team of brands archivists and historian, there are about eight of us, contributing, the equivalent of about three and a half, ft.
13:54:36 Our team is a bit larger around this particular collecting effort. Do you just special coven funding that the library have received to support various activities including acquisition.
13:54:51 We've been our private partners since 2009.
13:54:55 We also use conifer to capture some of our more particularly challenging content.
13:55:03 And we're basically collecting and preserving web content as a means to help fulfill and aligns collecting goals.
13:55:11 We collect around global health events.
13:55:14 So beginning in 2014 with the Ebola outbreak, and then currently coven 19.
13:55:21 We're also collecting topically on topics such as, including HIV AIDS vaccine hesitancy and the ongoing opioid epidemic.
13:55:33 Next slide.
13:55:37 So MLM began collecting around the corner virus on at the end of January 2020, a day The World Health Organization declared the epidemic of public health emergency of international concern.
13:55:53 This is one of our prompts for collecting.
13:55:56 So we'll do that we'll, we'll collect through the duration of the pandemic.
13:56:01 You can see here on this slide on a screenshot from one of our earliest captures of the World Health Organization's site so this was before, have actually been officially named and so we're still on the novel coronavirus.
13:56:16 Our efforts, align with MLM collection development guidelines for web content.
13:56:24 public health disaster management popular literature, history of medicine.
13:56:29 So in addition to web archiving. The library is collecting other historical material, including public uncovered 19 including public health posters, videos, some artifacts, not many.
13:56:47 Tony fantasy baseball card. And then the library of course is also collecting the professional literature for Corbett 19.
13:56:55 Next slide please.
13:56:59 Collecting around KUVan 19 has been a unique has been unique and challenging in many ways, as its impact has been experienced by everyone involved, as we develop the collection we are experiencing the impact of the pandemic on personal levels in our own
13:57:18 lives. And on professional levels, working in an institution actively involved in the response.
13:57:26 We've worked early, with a historian, in our libraries history of medicine division to develop a broad scope for the collection. We also consulted with subject matter experts within the library and disaster health and infectious disease.
13:57:43 To help define the collection scope.
13:57:46 and we knew this was going to be big.
13:57:48 None of us knew at all how big it was, it was going to get.
13:57:53 We did see a lot of input, much more so than we have in previous collecting efforts.
13:58:09 And we also accepted recommendation from the public invitations through blog posts and other strategic communications.
13:58:20 We've been collaborating with the medical and scientific museum community also collecting around covenant team, and participated and archiving meetings early on, on, on credit collecting.
13:58:36 While our collection is us focused.
13:58:36 We also have been contributing to a broader international focus internationally focused collection developed by the International internet preservation Consortium.
13:59:18 See to focus our collecting we developed a set of keywords or topical areas, and we've been meeting weekly as a group to discuss new areas to document as the story has evolved over time.
13:59:18 So we're basically identifying websites, blogs, videos, and social media documenting a variety of aspects of the pandemic, including and go to the next slide to have a few examples.
13:59:19 The stress of the pandemic on our health facilities biomedical research on vaccines and therapeutics see on the next slide, you'll see the role of health disparities in infection and mortality.
13:59:35 Prevention and Control including resources and American Sign Language.
13:59:40 Next slide.
13:59:42 And then, many more so here is our growing list of keywords. I won't read them all, but we are collecting broadly, sort of the social dimensions impact on the health workforce.
13:59:59 Sort of the ethics on who's getting vaccines first How are you how are they being distributed protection of non medical essential workers efforts to count cases, and track the disease.
14:00:14 To date, we've identified over 9000 seats to crawl.
14:00:20 Next slide.
14:00:23 So I just included this slide, for those who wish to learn more about the effort, here's a link to our collection archive it.
14:00:31 And then there's some link to a blog posts, we've written a few on this effort, as well as a link to an article that we publish last fall, about our coronavirus collecting in the Journal of American Medical Library Association.
14:00:51 Thank you.
14:01:00 So, wonderful, thank you very much everyone. And so now we're going to transition into our moderated question and answer portion.
14:01:11 So if everyone could also unmute yourselves.
14:01:14 The first question that we wanted you all to answer is, can you walk us through your appraisal approach, how our nominations, so I could an approved and Karen Are you started as you introduced this a little bit already but if you could expand on this
14:01:30 and get us started.
14:01:33 Sure. So it depends on the type of crawl that we're doing our web our caffeine sort of falls into three areas event based, where we often get nominations from staff, and from the public, like several of the other groups, ongoing crawls that are determined
14:01:52 either by the university archivist or the curator for 21st century collections. And then sometimes we also have closure crawls where we are trying to document, a faculty project or a library project that is going to be you know removed from servers and
14:02:09 when the latter case we work really closely with people who created the content to make sure that they understand what we are able to capture and what we're not.
14:02:18 So it really depends on the type of crawl.
14:02:22 We have the vent based nomination process.
14:02:27 It also depends on the number of nominations we get in.
14:02:31 So for example with the August, 11 and 12th night the right rally and counter protests, we had many many many more nominations than our staff was able to to get and some of the material was disappearing really really fast, particularly that the content
14:02:48 that was on sites that sort of disappeared or got removed or. And so we tried to prioritize the content that we thought might be more ephemeral. And then we also asked the curators to prioritize.
14:03:01 What was the most important for them to capture. And again, the University archive side had sort of a different perspective than our curator who was collecting for sort of the community like efforts.
14:03:14 And I'm going to pass it on to someone else to share, I believe.
14:03:19 Who's next is it's a key.
14:03:24 Yeah happen.
14:03:55 So,
14:03:55 yes, that I mean that's sort of the the short of it. But what that actually looks like and I do sort of have support from my colleagues at the Schaumburg and and also just people in the world who know what I'm doing.
14:03:59 And so, sort of like at the beginning, as I was like trying to figure this out, was really close conversation with the curator for manuscripts archives and we're books, and also the former director, Kevin young and sort of we had like this shared Google
14:04:20 Doc, where essentially they would just like drop
14:04:26 URLs there in different categories, whether it was like religious institution or an obituary, and then sort of. From there, I would kind of take a look.
14:04:41 For the most part, you know like, the curator is my supervisor and then the director is the director So who am I to be like, no, this isn't going in there and so those all sort of went in there and then outside of their contributions, just sort of like
14:04:58 staff, occasionally will send things there's not sort of any formal process because it's pretty rare that people send me contributions but not every now and then people are like, I think this is that the you might want to include.
14:05:16 And usually is one of have no our chief of staff.
14:05:23 Casey
14:05:26 would send me like forward me sort of the newsletters that would come from local Harlem institutions like the Harlem Chamber of Commerce, commerce, which is like, I don't live in Harlem so like that's not something I subscribe to So, but he does and so
14:05:44 I was really grateful for that and it sort of led me into thinking about newsletters of things that I do subscribe to that are sort of like related to coded which pretty much every email was been related to go over it at that point.
14:06:01 But so many of these newsletters you know have like their separate URL for like MailChimp, or something. And so grateful for that and then also just me existing as a black person in the world.
14:06:15 Being on social media and like, you know, communicating with my friends and family like people send me URLs all the time.
14:06:23 So in many ways it is a collection that documents because it you know experience of the African diaspora and experience but also like my personal experience a bit, and like sort of the the types of information that I would come across, just being in the
14:06:40 world.
14:06:42 So yes,
14:06:47 yes, Melissa are pretty happy to jump in. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, we really did kind of go broader in our selection for this collection just has so many impacted.
14:07:26 And it really did help to have our historian, consult with us and she's a member of our group at early on, just kind of how we wanted to shape this effort.
14:07:26 So, most of the selections recommendations were made by folks in our prior Working Group, but we really did get, you know, a huge amount from staff across the library and they would add them to a shared spreadsheet and use it also sort of provide keywords
14:07:44 so we could kind of get a sense of what they were collecting or what they were identifying and then all recommendations so including staff including from our office of NIH history and some of our curators of historical collections or historic audio visuals
14:08:03 Collection Manager for example, has been selecting and sending us content as well.
14:08:30 That lent itself to using archive it to collect all of those recommendations were then reviewed are there in the process of being reviewed by the historian, and one of our selection librarian so it's kind of interesting having some from the historical
14:08:30 collections and then someone from our general collections, and they're just both working through kind of that long, long list of recommended content and we are trying to, you know, be more selective especially with maybe some of the news content and we
14:08:52 keep. I think we're just trying to, you know, we're definitely trying to document the federal response state response organizations on, but we are also collecting around the news, and so that there's no video and so there's someone off content and trying
14:09:11 to be trying to work on and be more selective about content so it's really about sort of substantive, so does the article represent a point of view a unique point of view is is a, is a sort of fully express I can, can we can we, you know, hopefully that
14:09:28 that will be something that future researchers will want access to.
14:09:34 So, but it's, yeah the volume has, has been a challenge for us even with with kind of more staffing than we've had in the past, it's just overwhelming we know we're obviously not you know we're probably scratching the surface here.
14:09:58 So, I'm a little bit of, it's gonna take a little bit of background to I think I'm so like I had mentioned earlier, at the earliest point in the pandemic when we did not have an official collection.
14:10:13 Yet,
14:10:13 there were thousands of nominations. And then the Library of Congress actually had reached our crawler are contracted crawler capacity and we had to end.
14:10:26 New nominations across the board, things that were already crawling kept crawling but we had to put a major collection pause and the exceptions during that time where the coronavirus web archive and a collection that I was not part of curating which was
14:10:54 the protest against racism web archive. And so that was kind of to save space and, you know, money and things like that. And so during that time.
14:10:57 The web archiving team and the collection Development Office analyzed all of the nominations that had tags of coronavirus covert name team, what have you, in our internal workflow tool, and from there they identified gaps subjects, and they identified
14:11:14 high priority sub topics that needed representation as well. And then subjects that were pretty well represented already so we kind of had that had this very broad brush to begin with.
14:11:28 As the project team. So then, from there.
14:11:35 Since we have our limit of 250 new nominations plus dealing with backlog, you know, putting on my archivists hat I thought well, appraisal. Right, so the rubric that I created worked really, really well.
14:11:50 And so I had built in to the rubric, whether the subject of the website was a gap that was identified or a high priority some topic or something else.
14:12:01 And then also I built into it a permissions category so a lot of institutions approach permissions differently for web archiving the Library of Congress has a pretty stringent permissions policy that's created by our Office of the General Counsel, and
14:12:18 so different permissions categories affect whether or not you know we just need to notify the site owner that we're crawling it but we need their permission to display it off site or we need permission for both are we don't need permission for either.
14:12:31 Sometimes they don't get notified at all it and they have all of that, and I'm not a lawyer I don't work in that office so.
14:12:38 But that does exist and so that was built into the rubric as well with the, with the bias to prioritize content that can be accessed off site.
14:12:48 And then the other permissions categories had to do the sorry the other rubric categories had to do with whether we were nominating a top level domain or a single page, or a one single page, deep, or just a single PDF file or a single video so and that
14:13:09 the bias in that part of the rubric was to prioritize top level across and then the rest of the rubric, just your basic nuts and bolts kind of archival appraisal categories you know informational value you know how substantial.
14:13:25 Was it the evidentiary value you know Is this about the pandemic or is this just about disease. In general, the uniqueness of it, you know, is, is everybody you know posting this kind of thing, you know, do we need every single day to track her out there
14:13:42 no problem you know so things like that looking at uniqueness authenticity was a really big one because it's really easy to repost content and share it.
14:13:52 So, I prefer to have the Pfizer information. The information from the Pfizer website about the Pfizer vaccine, as opposed to what some medical organization or celebrity doctor or somebody has to say about the Pfizer vaccine.
14:14:10 And then also the intrinsic value.
14:14:14 You know, if it's the CDC we're going to call it the, you know, so it's it has to do with the importance of the, of the Creator. So then we move to our first wave of a couple hundred nominations and from within the project team and our team leaders.
14:14:47 Working backwards and moving forwards. So, that's the appraisal approach for this collection.
14:14:52 That's not what I've used for the other collections, but I'm not gonna, I'm not going to really talk about those during the session.
14:15:01 Awesome. Thank you. Um, so this question. Next question I'm going to cut costs as a kid to get started.
14:15:07 Do you look at collecting efforts from other institutions to inform your web archiving selection choices.
14:15:18 So, short answers. No, I did not sort of like at the beginning of collecting and sort of a bit throughout, I think, sort of, someone before mentioned kind of participating in an archive it conversations about collecting encoded data and sort of in those
14:15:41 moments of being in community with other folks that are collecting, you know, at that point I would like sort of become curious and go look and other collections to just kind of see what the gaps are overall.
14:15:59 and, really, because of the specific scope of our collection at the Schaumburg center. I did sort of look to see if there were other collections that focus specifically on the black experience, which I when I did that search I don't even remember when
14:16:13 that was but I didn't find any other collections I did see sort of artifact collections around the black experience or oral histories, but not web archive.
14:16:26 And so it's kind of like even more Lone Ranger. He is just like, all right, I guess you know whatever you know, we kind of decided going in here is what's going, but was always like really interested in sort of like what other institutions were doing
14:16:48 were some, we're not like specifically excluding sort of news content with some things that I have noticed and seeing, whereas there are quite a few news articles in our collection.
14:17:06 Because that's sort of where you know the newest information and like getting sort of that editorial piece to have like how people are specifically feeling about what they're learning and experiencing on the ground.
14:17:22 So yeah, so not so much for selection choices but just kind of to know what's going on in the web archive and community. Overall, and also I remember that there was a sort of through the web archiving section of sa.
14:17:40 The, there was a spreadsheet with like all the web collecting efforts around covert 19 so that was really fun to just kind of like click through, you know people's collection just to see like what's going on.
14:17:58 Overall, Karen, would you like to jump in next.
14:18:04 Christine whichever one. I'll just go real quick. So Dan cabinet who actually was the in charge of the larger project in the Health Sciences Library he did reach out to other organizations in Virginia because we were focused specifically on Virginia and
14:18:14 particularly on UVA, obviously the VA hospital and Central Virginia.
14:18:20 But then we, but then he also went and talked to other organizations in Virginia to see where they were collecting and to see if anyone was collecting on the state level, and that did inform our choices.
14:18:35 Yeah, so I think as sort of as the Qs tagging you just kind of trying to kind of be aware of other collecting archivist and kind of neat.
14:18:45 You know, as we could with others, engaged in the efforts we had.
14:18:49 There's a federal web archiving working group we met last December, actually, and based on that I think we learned from yeah Melissa and kind of implemented a little bit of a ranking system.
14:19:17 much from our colleagues and and reading some really great blog posts from around the world on on on various efforts. And I think, you know, we've also found it valuable I found it valuable, I'm kind of our engagement with other medical museums and government
14:19:26 Kind of our engagement with other medical museums and government history offices to discuss collecting. So even though the formats are different. There were just, you know, so many common themes that helped shape our understanding about what might be
14:19:42 valuable to collect. And then the last thing I just wanted to say there were two really interesting series organized by one was by the American Historical associations are all available online.
14:19:56 Still with the recordings. So American Historical Association and then the Smithsonian Museum of American History both had
14:20:06 to have a webinar series around covert 19, and how share readers. Historians were thinking about it and kind of the the broad perspective, or the historical context and looking at it compared to previous epidemics and that I also found really helpful
14:20:27 and kind of thinking through that scope. In particular, there were some really valuable sessions on health disparities.
14:20:37 Essential workers and vaccines. So all of that kind of helped inform your approach.
14:20:46 So quick answer yes, I looked at the key is collection.
14:20:51 Just because I felt I felt like we weren't, we didn't have enough in there and to represent the black diaspora and especially how that community was being affected uniquely in this country.
14:21:04 So the black doctors coven 19 Consortium, I had nominated that collection also the speak Patrice coronavirus news for black folks. I found through the key is collection as well, but other just in general, again just knowing what's going on is always really
14:21:21 good you know the international internet preservation consortium had a he has a huge collaborative collection, but since the Library of Congress at the time we were you know limited to only 50 sites that were hosted outside the US.
14:21:36 We felt that IPC was was very much you know covering a lot of the International content, but overall I think it's, it's something to think about when you know as archivists we always say oh is this available elsewhere.
14:21:49 Is this the only thing, and we're talking about boring digital objects. We're not always. If ever dealing with the real original thing it's always a copy or a derivative or something so that's something to keep in mind but then also when we're talking
14:22:03 about web archiving, there is no guarantee that you know my crawler and Christie's crawler are going at the exact same time on the same URL at the same depth for the same length of time for the same ongoing length of time.
14:22:19 So I really think that there is a lot less to worry about. When it comes to duplicative content with web archiving to that kind of granular scale the way we think about it with curating a manuscript collection, or, for example, so that's just something
14:22:37 And of course, you know, if every single, you know coven collection you find has a particular URL and you're really tight on space, then you know that that's something to think about.
14:22:49 But I don't think seeing something show up in a few other places is as big of a deal, so.
14:22:57 Excellent. Well, let's go on to our next question then. And this one going to toss to Melissa. So what ethical issues, did you encounter, while curating your collections.
14:23:10 Okay, so for the, for the coronavirus web archive we had two major ethical issues. The first one was archiving websites, of us tribal government. So for instance, you know, the department of health of the Navajo.
14:23:30 And I had mentioned our permissions, the permissions policies from our office to the general counsel before. And according according to their instructions you know if it's government.
14:23:42 You know no notices necessary you can go for it. However, Jennifer Davis who was our working group member and work through the Law Library of Congress.
14:23:51 from what I understand, she has relationships and very carefully does ask for permission for ethical reasons from the sovereign nations. So that's one ethical issue.
14:24:13 And that's not what I have experienced with but the one that I do have experienced with is dealing with misinformation, because we know that with the pandemic misinformation was was really a hallmark of what's going on, or is really a hallmark of what's
14:24:27 going on. And so we thought to ourselves well how can we represent this and do it in a way that is responsible, so that we're not you know vindicating a content creator that we're not perpetuating harm.
14:24:43 how do we contextualize it within our digital collection.
14:24:46 So at first we were thinking Well, a lot of these websites that are miss that do have misinformation, or conspiracy theories, we would have to send them a permissions.
14:25:00 Notice, and we thought that that would be very dangerous. And that it would give them, you know some sort of thing of like well of course will write the Library of Congress says that we're a valuable part of the historical record so we didn't want to
14:25:13 do that.
14:25:14 So, I was searching instead. For aggregates of misinformation and I stumbled upon a gold mine, and it took over a month to get them to say yes but they finally did and I'm so so happy because this is a gem truly in this collection.
14:25:33 News guard technologies.
14:25:36 It's a journalism website where they have a coronavirus misinformation tracker, and they create these PDF files that are essentially nutrition labels with very in depth analysis of every single website they could find that had misinformation and categorize
14:25:54 by country in the world so not just the United States, and they had PDFs, about why it was what it was about it was misinformation.
14:26:06 You know, trying to verify creators and fact checking and it's really extensive and good information, and a really important part of the historical record.
14:26:17 And so, that one, I think, really covers it in terms of trying to document the misinformation in a responsible way.
14:26:26 And that one was a was a really a really great jewel in the crown and to get permission to include I think so i think i hope, and think that will be useful and they also included all of like the top myths about coven 19 as well.
14:26:41 Another part. Another way that we document and misinformation.
14:26:45 We recently got permission to archive. Dear pandemic.org, which is a team of women, medical workers who give you know they answer the public's questions about coven 19 and direct them to, you know, good information to backup their answers.
14:27:07 So trying, trying to document those efforts.
14:27:17 Would anybody else like to jump in,
14:27:21 I think, was done a really good job of talking about some of the permissions and the validation piece of other things to think about.
14:27:29 We certainly have talked about, you know, these events that are are capturing people in moments of trauma.
14:27:38 And so there certainly has been some discussion and people are posting things in the moment, not knowing what their long term desires are for, for, for having that remain public and those sorts of things so there has been some discussion about whether
14:27:55 we should pause to capture, or you know, also again and the events of August, 11 and 12th.
14:28:04 They're not just with web archiving but all of our capture there was concerned that we would be doing harm to protesters that we know that protesters, particularly protesters of color disproportionately get targeted through various means and wanting to
14:28:19 protect wanting to protect those people and so there was a lot of discussion about whether it was ethical for us to collect this content, and whether we should be collecting it without permission of the people who were the subject of the content and not
14:28:32 just the people who were the creators of the content which is sort of, um, so there's that issue and then there's also the issue of its impact on your staff.
14:28:43 Is it fair to ask a staff member to look at, for example, hatred, that was spewed about the young woman in Charlottesville Heather higher who was killed and there was some nasty horrible awful things being posted.
14:29:03 All things being posted about this, this young woman. Is it fair to be posted to make a staff person. Look at that, over and over. Is it fair to make them capture the car images of the car crashing into the crowd and it's the people being hurt.
14:29:22 Is that is that fair to your staff to ask them to look at that over and over and over again from various angles and perspectives. And so that's a, that's an ethical piece sort of on the other side is what can you ask your staff to do.
14:29:35 and, and how.
14:29:37 And how do you make sure that you are taking care of them as well.
14:29:44 Yeah. And as someone who posted in chat or to student employees absolutely we've talked about its impact on students as well.
14:29:54 Yeah, I just want to echo that. And I think, especially in thinking about sort of people comment and responses in moments of trauma, it's so incredibly important to sort of kind of hold space for people to change their minds and to,
14:30:19 to just, you know, live in that moment and I think for me.
14:30:24 Doing this like sort of during coven and like experiencing the same thing which is like different from you know you know documenting someone else's trauma.
14:30:33 But like experiencing that same trauma for myself and at cried. So many times when I've like you know encountered a specific article or heard someone story.
14:30:48 And so, just sort of recognizing.
14:30:54 And I think it for me in the appraisal process, thinking about it, to say like, is this something that do I think this is something that this person would want you know documented in this specific moment and if it feels like too specific and too heavy
14:31:11 and like that I'm like, you know what, I'm not going to include that of course, there are permission notices that go out specifically for sort of more personal content blog content, articles, not necessarily new articles, but just really, you know, being
14:31:30 careful and slow about it in order to make that assessment of.
14:31:35 If I were this person.
14:31:37 You know how would I feel about this particular inclusion and this permanent.
14:31:43 In that way.
14:31:51 I was going to say something else. Yes, don't remember but yeah, instead of moving, you know, with intention and with slowness just to, to be able to think through that.
14:32:03 Fully
14:32:09 Israel circa I just might as an alum I think I'm kind of our, some of our biggest ethical issues have been around vaccine hesitancy and and misinformation.
14:32:23 So we've been collecting.
14:32:26 You know sites documenting myths and misinformation and then articles, reflecting a wide range of viewpoints and we want to document this diversity of perspectives is important to the collection but it's kind of interesting being positioned at the National
14:32:43 Library of Medicine that is trying to communicate, public health and for me really important in public health information and then of course within NIH to.
14:32:55 So kind of trying to, um, you know, think about how we're presenting the content that we're collecting so if I write a blog post for example about are collecting and I had this really interesting maybe poster from earlier on the pandemic that reflected
14:33:22 a different message now that you know just based on all that has been, perhaps learned since then, it. I don't want the message to get muddied at all and you know things need to be clear, so it's it's it's, you know, that was kind of a.
14:33:32 This is different than, then, then our other collections, but this is still an ongoing pandemic. And there are some really important and, you know, you want clear message about vaccination.
14:33:43 And while we're trying to document this diversity of perspectives and it's, and I'm so glad that we're doing it is a historical collection, and it is different from other library work.
14:33:59 And, yeah, I think, everything else. Yeah.
14:34:02 Thank you.
14:34:04 I can add.
14:34:07 Thank you all, I think, given the number of questions that we received so far I think we're just going to pivot and go straight into our audience, q&a.
14:34:17 So our first question here is, and I think this one is for Melissa.
14:34:22 What is the workflow system that is used at the Library of Congress I think you've already touched on this a bit but if you could go into greater depth.
14:34:29 Sure, so I'm not sure if the question means what tools do we use but I'll just say a little about that too so the way it works at the Library of Congress.
14:34:42 We're a very very ginormous place. And so, you know, you kind of need an org chart in front of you to figure out who's wearing who does what.
14:34:50 So, we have the, we have what are called recommending officers, so the subject experts, essentially, and then that includes me, where we're at the beginning of the life cycle, right where we're selecting the content we're proposing collections and those
14:35:09 can be like what Carl was saying, either event based or subject based ongoing, you know, single moment, things like that. So, we're at the beginning and then the, we have our wonderful fabulous web archiving team, and they are scheduling the crawls and
14:35:27 running the crawls doing the larger QA there.
14:35:32 We had been contracting with the Internet Archive for a long time.
14:35:48 For our massive crawls.
14:35:38 But we're now switching to a different contractor called mirror web based in the UK, because they're going to do more of the QA, for us, from what I understand, and also they would do a lot of the.
14:35:53 Essentially what is the technical appraisal work that the web archiving team had to do very manually and what a lot of what the subject experts had to do when we would, you know, kind of assess the captures, to see if we were getting what we nominated
14:36:08 to begin with, so kind of in the middle of the the life cycle a little bit. And so mirror web is going to be selecting crawlers for us.
14:36:18 Whether so that helps a lot with dynamic content so whether or not it's Citrix or Rosler or some or anything else.
14:36:26 The pet because different crawlers get different types of content and better.
14:36:29 So then the.
14:36:33 Once a collection has reached a one year embargo, then they are released into our digital collections, and they get released updated on a monthly basis.
14:36:46 And then when you see a fancy digital collection landing page like the one that I had shown you for the coronavirus web archive.
14:36:52 That's actually a separate step that staff can choose to do or not to do.
14:36:57 So you can search web archives in our digital collections.
14:37:02 You know, just with keywords and subjects, but you can take extra steps, and I choose to do this because I think it's easier on the users to, basically, select LC subject headings, and I'll see name authorities that get added into the descriptive metadata
14:37:18 for each website you can add abstracts which are full text searchable.
14:37:23 Something getting more into that all of that descriptive metadata for fine ability and usability, because our web archives themselves are not full text searchable so if the metadata is good, then users have a better experience trying to find what they
14:37:36 need and use what they need.
14:37:39 And then, let's just say an event is over or a website has stopped crawling either the recommending officer or a member of the web recruiting team will end the crawl for an individual URL different circumstances may mean just sending an entire collection
14:37:52 to end the crawl. So there are a lot of different ways to do it but there are a lot of moving parts because of the size of the institution and different parties are part of different parts of the life cycle at different times.
14:38:07 Well, thank you.
14:38:09 Next question again for Melissa. What's the last digit of the year that the performing arts archive began its missing. Oh yeah, I saw that it got it was, it ended up on top of Jerry Mulligan space for Jerry and all again.
14:38:22 It was too fat so that that collection began in 2011, before I came to the Library of Congress.
14:38:28 And then, yes, so that collection began in 2011 and I believe it went online as like a formal collection in 2014. And then I reworked the scope in 2018 2019 and.
14:38:43 And that's when, yeah. Short answer 2011
14:38:49 going to wear too fast Melissa next one's also for you. So, can you share more details on the appraisal rubric you developed and, sort of, so in an earlier question, but also some examples of web pages that didn't make the cut.
14:39:04 I don't know any off the top of my head right now so I would like to save more time so that my other colleagues can answer questions.
14:39:17 Excellent.
14:39:17 Oh here's another one. So, this one is sort of aimed at all of our panelists. Is there any evidence of use of this archive material so far.
14:39:36 So we haven't released, like the lot of the contents of recovered 19 one is, is ongoing. Right. But I do know that the August, 11, and 12th material is available via archive it.
14:39:52 And it, and it I know it gets used in classes for sure we have several media classes and some one's looking at protests and social justice and those sorts of things so I know for sure that it's being used by students, and I know anecdotally that it's
14:40:09 also being used by other researchers who are coming to look at the materials
14:40:18 for our collecting I know there has been some use of other materials in our global health events collection so our Ebola collection and Zika, there's been some interesting work front at Old Dominion University from their computer science department, analyzing
14:40:37 some of the content and that collection.
14:40:39 But yeah i mean i think that's, it's any we're still obviously so much, you know in this pandemic and and and then current information is probably you know is most important.
14:40:55 And, you know, we're all. I mean, you know, I feel it for me we're trying to think towards a time where we look back on this.
14:41:13 In retrospect, but that that young the future.
14:41:13 And, as you heard earlier Melissa use our collection at the Schaumburg center.
14:41:19 So that's one example of us, and, and also had a couple of of artists that are creating content online about Kovats reach out to me for inclusion.
14:41:34 To say that they've seen some, some of their like friends and colleagues work included and so that they wanted to. They want to see if I like I'm interested in their content it kind of feels like I'm like, acquiring like a large our collection but it's
14:41:51 just it's a website but it is still somewhat artworks collection so yes I think people have been using it in that way but not so much for research, research because, like, a lot of the information is still the website, they're still alive and.
14:42:10 Yeah.
14:42:10 Anything is sort of that people are using it as like a curated sort of space to see like different types of information rather than.
14:42:19 Kind of like researching like how people were doing something in the back.
14:42:42 Stephen you're muted.
14:42:46 Realize that just as I saw the button. Thank you, Melissa.
14:42:49 So this one is for everyone. Um, so if you weren't using archivists or conifer what other capture methods, would you consider.
14:43:06 So I know that I didn't do it myself so I can't talk about the specifics that we use w get early on in the 19 capture and that there are some pluses to that but there's some way of automating in a way that the other ones require a little bit more hand
14:43:25 holding.
14:43:28 So I know that we have used that is that is another tool we have used
14:43:42 the web marketing team makes those decisions, not the collection curators, but I do know that during the period of time that we were contracting with the Internet Archive.
14:43:54 Our crawler choices were heretics and browse blur.
14:44:01 And those options.
14:44:03 They may change with the shift to the new crawler to the new crawl contractor, but again, those are decisions that they make.
14:44:25 There's no other sort of Final thoughts, we can move on to our next question.
14:44:31 A couple of you have mentioned getting recommendations for pages to archive. Can you talk about how you approached faculty or staff or students or community members and invited them to submit suggestions.
14:44:47 We did it via social media, the same way we do, you know, outreach in other ways you know we tweeted about it and we put it, we may have a times created blog posts and I'm not sure if we actually like sent out directed targeted emails, but then you know
14:45:07 we got on the local news. And so we shared the information that way.
14:45:14 The great thing about social media though is that it. It flies right you you send out one tweets. And if you, you know if you send it out in the right way.
14:45:22 I'm amazed how far it gets spread we also then internally, sent messages to our own staff, pointing them and directing them to the recommendation form and got got lots of information that way as well.
14:45:41 similar approach to here we also kind of presented at library White's town hall meeting earlier on in the pandemic.
14:45:57 Yeah, blog posts. And then just a library wide message just kind of making sure everyone kind of knew about the project and gave them an opportunity to collaborate we didn't push much further than that we've received, I don't know, probably about 1000
14:46:12 nominations from the staff and not very many from external to MLM, and I'm sure you know more, that have been done on somebody you know, but photo that was our approach to.
14:46:36 So, the are working group we were the ones that were asked to do the selection.
14:46:44 Because everyone involved. We're recommending officers that have been incredibly active with what archiving and the library, multiple years of experience and so forth.
14:46:57 So, but of course you know there were only 10 of us there and not every single subject area that the Library of Congress clicks on was represented by a staff member and, you know, like I said, we kind of all had to go a little bit outside of our subject
14:47:10 areas, but, you know, a lot of us, you know, talk to colleagues internally and, you know, being, not a university.
14:47:21 Before any press release went out, we didn't want to put out a public call because we have to be very careful with working through the Office of Communications and everything has to go through its process in the government so.
14:47:36 So we kept everything you know internal but you know for example, we didn't have a poetry specialist on in our team. But we had multiple staff members who worked in the same section of the library as a poetry specialist and they just reached out and said
14:47:50 hey, do you have any ideas. We ran those ideas through the rubric few of them made it in like pandemic poems.org. So, you know, in the end, and and I'm, I'm very much point emphasize that this is just my opinion that in the end I think subject specialty
14:48:11 only gets you so far.
14:48:14 You know, we're, we're archivists we're participating in a documentation strategy initiative. And while a while and approach to in a pre while and approach to appraisal can be dangerous, that can be summarized as I know it when I see it, you know as dangerous
14:48:32 dangerous as that is having the other guardrails up of what's your appraisal strategy, what's your scope, do you have a deadline, do you have a size limit.
14:48:43 Are you doing your own, are you doing research are you communicating with other people, you know, in the end, you can still create a really great web archive.
14:48:53 So I'm not trying to at all diminish subjects specialty in archives, but I do think that if we get too focused in on that, then we lose a lot of the other really important skills that can be brought in to help make a collection a really good collection.
14:49:17 Yeah. And for me, there was no sort of formal nomination process.
14:49:23 Nothing out to the public. And sort of a month staff would just sort of give updates about the collection and then people would, you know if they felt so called to would just be like oh yeah there's this thing that I saw the other day, or like one example
14:49:41 is one of my colleagues sort of was like, have you included anything about like the black Muslim experience and I was like, I think maybe there's like a, like a seed or two.
14:49:55 And she was like, Okay, well I want to connect you with this person who's like a part of this like black Muslim consortium that has just been created, I'm going to like connect you with her and so I'd like started speaking with that person who was outside
14:50:10 of the institution, and who then you know sort of was my like sort of informant of sorts, you know, because she was like, I have a couple of sites to that I think you should include as like I kind of have the insider knowledge of knowing, you know what,
14:50:26 some folks are like sites that are popping up or some efforts that are happening.
14:50:31 So, kind of the nomination process is a bit like unwieldy and like, kind of like one off.
14:50:39 Random situation, which works well, because it's just me like I can imagine if there was this like massive nomination process is like, you know, getting 50 feet today and I'm just like, I have a very like responsibilities.
14:50:53 So, this sort of one off with like just the right tempo for one person.
14:51:05 Excellent. Here's another question on again addressed to everyone. What are your thoughts on asking for permission to crawl sites, given that they're publicly available to anyone.
14:51:15 Is there an argument to be made for not asking for permission.
14:51:31 I'll take a first stab at that on a, we really an alum, our policy Rick we collect a lot of what we're doing. So these are public facing
14:51:44 organizational websites federal government sites, let's say, um, and, you know, a lot of its.
14:51:54 So a lot of the content we are collecting under fair use, and we have developed a policy around the Arielle guidelines for academic libraries around probably web content.
14:52:06 So one of the principles is it's very used to create a web archive on on a theme or topic, But we also recognize.
14:52:15 And we do include some personal creative content. And so in cases where it's a personal blog.
14:52:24 Something more personal, we will reach out and notify for that that depth, our intent to crawl and give them an opportunity to opt out, and we've had a very positive reaction to this.
14:52:41 We don't ask for a response but we usually do get some very that people are generally happy to have their content. Included in the archives so that's that's been our approach and and so then we've been doing this again since 2009 So the combination of
14:52:59 And so we've been doing this again since 2009 So the combination of of notification and various.
14:53:07 I had talked about our permissions guidelines before so i'm not i'm kind of rehash that but what I will say is that there are actually advantages and disadvantages to to permissions.
14:53:21 So for example, for the Performing Arts.
14:53:26 Most of what I carry is considered a creative expression or virtual exhibition, you know, a choreographers website that has videos of their work, or a conductor of an orchestra conductor, whose blog is extremely extensive and it's, you know, their creative
14:53:46 writing.
14:53:49 And so a lot of times you know our, so our internal workflow tool will automatically send three emails, but the email address that comes from can look kind of spammy it often ends up in spam folders and so then after those three tries it's expired.
14:54:06 So, what I have learned is that it takes a lot of time and not letting things sit too long for me to really go after person after person and I, I think I kind of cut my teeth on some donor relations stuff with dealing with permissions for web archives
14:54:24 because I would really need to articulate to the site owner, you know, this is why your website is such an important part of this collection. This is why we want it.
14:54:35 And a lot of times I've changed people's minds where they were where there have been many times where people or organizations, would say well you know we weren't really so hard on it before but now I think now that you've really explained it you know
14:54:46 sure this would be great sometimes people are extremely happy.
14:54:50 I've had in the professional organizations for performing arts whoever have there have been some pretty prominent organizations that just flat out like responded to the automated permission requests and said, No, do not do it.
14:55:03 So sometimes those surprises happen, which then you know is a good reason to not waste crawling resources to then wait for a takedown notice, and then dealing with that.
14:55:16 So I mean there are advantages and disadvantages.
14:55:25 Yeah, I think, for me like really the sort of in the kind of appraisal process for for myself, kind of have like a US Air table and that's sort of where my entire workflow happens.
14:55:45 And so I have like a checkbox this like permission needed, which, that is sort of decided based on Is it a public facing site like a New York Times article for example or, you know, if it's one of the Schaumburg sites or in YPL site, versus like someone's
14:56:03 like personal blog or you know very vulnerable status statement like maybe it's not maybe it is in the New York Times, but it's like a very personal story, then maybe I will try to locate the content creator.
14:56:18 I think it. I think there is a case to be made that it takes a lot of work.
14:56:26 And, like on a personal note, sometimes the notes feel like rejections like oh man like I really like wanted to include your work in like I thought it was like perfect and then there's a no.
14:56:38 And I haven't gotten really too many knows just like a lot of people are really unfamiliar with the concept of web archiving and, you know, sort of want to know more, and they're like, you know, does this take the coffee right away from me.
14:56:54 What if I want this to you know come down or, you know, this is a team of folks, am I able to speak for all of us or just a lot of questions there and it's just kind of like to say yes please.
14:57:08 I'll answer all your questions and say yes.
14:57:10 But I think it's just so important to give people that, you know, sort of, or allow people that sovereignty over, you know their content.
14:57:22 You know, whether it's public or not and like of course you can access things on the internet.
14:57:28 But sometimes people don't expect anyone to find their blog except for like the people who know the URL, you know, but said that they personally shared it like my own blog, don't know what that is like that URL so someone found it I'd be like, I don't
14:57:44 know if I want you to do that. So, again, you know, being empathetic and like putting myself in people's shoes and I think that's the important, even though like the permission process definitely does take a lot of work sometimes.
14:58:04 I gone Oh I'm so sorry. It's okay. I just wanna say we don't have a robust permissions process like the rest of you do, we do rely heavily on Fair Use we talk about it and I would say for anyone who's trying to do web archiving I would say it is iterative
14:58:18 right and like we're constantly talking about best practices talking at the moment we don't, we might get there at some point.
14:58:26 But right now we rely on fair use, and we are aware that if someone has a problem with something we've crawled, what's the key is to be empathetic and recognize that this is, this is about them in their sovereignty and and and make sure that you know
14:58:38 what to do if somebody comes to you and is like, you know, if you don't have that permissions process that you, you have a mechanism for how you're going to handle that.
14:58:49 Yeah, the quick follow up I was going to say was, I think, secure you brought up a really important point that we see it in archives we see it in born in archiving born digital content and now it's really exploding with web archiving that we really need
14:59:04 as a profession to educate our users about what it is we do.
14:59:11 And this it's, this is just such a prime example. And, you know, and public facing just because something's public facing now and available now doesn't mean someone will want it to be accessible forever.
14:59:27 So that's just something to keep him on there as well.
14:59:32 I think that's a great note on which to end our session on.
14:59:38 Unfortunately, you know, we're out of time. So first off, thanks to everyone who was able to join us here today. I noticed that we didn't get to a number of questions.