Summary reaction to: Archiving Web Sites for Preservation and Access: MODS, METS and MINERVA.

Citation:
Guenther, Rebecca and Leslie Myrick. (2006) "Archiving Web Sites for Preservation and Access: MODS, METS and MINERVA." Journal of Archival Organization 4, No. 1/2: 145 - 170.

Creating subject specific web archives could prove useful for future researchers. I doubt that the library and archive community has the means to archive everything of scholarly interest on the web, but we should try to select major topics for which archives should be established. The LC decision to archive 2000 and 2002 election websites will provide a unique insight into how the web has changed politics. Archiving websites for selected topics will raise all of the concerns regarding selection, including balanced coverage, bias, and censorship. Web archiving will be another form of collection development.

Deriving most of the metadata from the existing website will help keep web archiving projects viable, and the selective intervention of catalogers will provide enhanced access and add value to the collections. The use of METS to document the structure of the website will serve as a key component in the preservation of the web resources. Although archiving these materials may serve researchers well into the future, I wonder how we will archive all of the digital material we currently purchase. I'm glad to see work addressing the issue of archiving freely available materials, but I worry about continued access to current purchased electronic materials. Some of the same methods could be applied to subscription materials if libraries and vendors could work out archival agreements.