National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NSDA) Releases 2016 Web Archiving Survey Report and Dataset

From the Digital Library Federation:

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance is pleased to announce the release of the 2016 Web Archiving Survey Report..
From January 20 to February 16, 2016, a team representing multiple NDSA member institutions and interest groups conducted a survey of organizations in the United States actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the Web. This effort built upon a similar survey undertaken by NDSA in late 2011 and published online in June 2012 and a second survey in late 2013 published online in September 2014.
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A few major takeaways from the report include:

• More programs are moving from pilot to production (79% of respondents classified their status as production; only 5% as pilot)

• There are increased perceptions of progress over past 2 years (77% respondents reported that their program had made either significant or some progress over the past two years.)

• The top 3 areas where organizations have made the most progress are: data capture, appraisal and selection, and vision and objectives

• The top 3 areas where organizations have made the least progress are: access/use/reuse, metadata/description, and quality assurance and analysis

• The number of respondents who are transferring their Web archive data from an external service (such as Archive-It) remains low at ~20%

• Staffing levels for web archiving remain low: 76% (64 of 84) of organizations are devoting less than the equivalent of one fulltime employee’s (FTE) time to web archiving

• The top three staff skills essential to development and success of programs: facility with archiving tools, skills for appraisal and selection, skills for performing quality assurance

And finally, the report reveals a growing trend seen across the reports that shows a significant interest in collaboration on a number of and finally, the report reveals a growing trend seen across the reports that shows a significant interest in collaboration on a number of fronts.

Read the Complete Blog Post
Direct to Full Text Report (32 pages; PDF)
Direct to Survey Questions (18 pages; PDF)
Direct to Survey Dataset (via Dataverse)

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