New Partnership Will See Transfer of California Digital Library Web Archiving Service (WAS) to Internet Archive’s Archive-It

From the California Digital Library:

The CDL and the UC Libraries are partnering with Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service. In the coming year, CDL’s Web Archiving Service (WAS) collections and all core infrastructure activities, i.e., crawling, indexing, search, display, and storage, will be transferred to Archive-It. The CDL remains committed to web archiving as a fundamental component of its mission to support the acquisition, preservation and dissemination of content. This new partnership will allow the CDL to meet its mission and goals more efficiently and effectively and provide a robust solution for our stakeholders.
Eight years after the release of WAS, we found ourselves at a critical juncture. The constantly changing and ever-increasing complexity of the web poses significant challenges to the current web archiving toolset and requires frequent upgrades to stay ahead. It became clear that there was a significant opportunity cost to maintaining WAS, which would not leave us with the capacity to develop new added-value web archiving services, such as tools for researchers, computational analysis of aggregated archival corpora, or work toward integrating web archives with other format types.

Learn More About the CDL/Internet Archive Partnership in the Complete Blog Post
Note: Internet Archive’s Archive-It provides many organizations (from governments to elementary schools) with fee-based web archiving services.
Many of the topic/subject oriented archives are publicly accessible and UNLIKE The Wayback Machine are keyword searchable!
As of today more than 2,700 collections (archiving close to 10 billion urls) are available. You can browse/search a directory of their public collections here.

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Associations and Organizations, Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Libraries, Preservation, School Libraries