New York Art Resources Consortium Releases Final Report on Web Archiving (Reframing Collections for a Digital Age)

From the Project Overview Page:

The Frick Art Reference Library recently conducted a pilot project in partnership with the Internet Archive to capture born-digital content associated with art auctions. The project identified issues that need to be resolved before NYARC libraries can move from an ad hoc to a sustainable collecting program. Some of these issues are crawl efficiency and frequency, format challenges, intellectual property problems, and the need for a common discovery environment.
To address the issues that arose during the Frick pilot project, the NYARC libraries, funded by the Mellon grant, will engage three consultants. One will be employed to help determine the “tipping point” (i.e., the moment of critical mass) for the transition of analog to digital formats for specialized art resources. This will involve interviewing key market leaders such as Pace Galleries, Adelson Galleries, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonham’s, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Public Catalogue Foundation (UK), and others. The consultant will also conduct focus groups with the curatorial staff and information technology staff of NYARC parent institutions to determine researcher requirements and best practices for electronic archives management, respectively. He or she will recommend what NYARC libraries should collect from a content perspective. A second consultant will review existing web archiving projects such as the Library of Congress Minerva and the UK Web Archive initiatives. He or she will also examine approaches for collecting content such as Archive-It and the Web Archiving Service of the California Digital Library. The consultant will recommend what can be collected from a technical aspect, the best methods of web archiving, potential collaboration partners, and ways to address intellectual property, ethical, and access issues. A third consultant will review the existing technical infrastructure in light of the technical requirements and review technical solutions to the born-digital challenge at hand. He or she will recommend the best technical solutions and prepare a funding bid.
This exploratory project will be coordinated by Deborah Kempe, Chief of Collections Management and Access at the Frick Art Reference Library on behalf of NYARC.

From the Deliverables Web Page:

The biggest take-away from our research is that collaboration is essential to make processes more streamlined, to tackle the abundance of material being published online, and to collectively work towards making our systems more flexible to deal with the variety of formats that now make up a 21st century library collection. The following reports are being made available to disseminate our findings and help foster a dialogue in the art library community about how we can tackle the challenges presented in a collaborative way:”>Bit More From the Deliverables Web Page

Materials

Direct to Final Report (6 pages; PDF)
Direct to Summary of Consultants’ Recommendations (5 pages; PDF)
Direct to Project Proposal (9 pages; PDF)
Direct to Truman Technologies Report (32 pages; PDF)
H/T: @Archive-It

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