Digital Archiving Documents and Web Sites at the Stanford University Libraries

From the The Stanford Daily:

In the face of challenges posed by an increase in social media, archivists at the Stanford University Libraries have adapted new technologies to digitally archive a traditionally community-driven database of Stanford documents.
Library Archivist Daniel Hartwig said that documents have been traditionally collected from Stanford staff or alumni who feel that they have something to contribute to the study of the history of Stanford. The catalog includes personal letters of former University President Donald Tresidder, lecture notes from students in the 1960s and materials from the controversial work of psychology professor Philip Zimbardo.
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“We’ve known how to archive paper for quite some time,” said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development for the Stanford Libraries. “There’s a lot of new art and science that needs to be developed for digital archiving. We’ve been doing a lot of web archiving for Stanford websites. There’s no copyright issues there…so we’ve captured well over 300 discrete websites totaling, I think, close to half a terabyte of data.”
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Stanford Archives is now using tools such as Archive Facebook to save records of Facebook activities.
“It’s a plug-in you install through your Firefox browser,” Hartwig said. “It creates a local copy of basically your entire Facebook presence and then you can copy that over to our drop box.”

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Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Journal Articles, Lecture, Libraries, Resources