Building a master s degree on digital archiving and web archiving. Sara Aubry (IT department, BnF) Clément Oury (Legal Deposit department, BnF)

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1 Building a master s degree on digital archiving and web archiving Sara Aubry (IT department, BnF) Clément Oury (Legal Deposit department, BnF)

2 Objectives of the presentation > Present and discuss an experiment aimed at building a academic training in web archiving > A master s degree on digital archives > With a large part dedicated to web archiving > (as far as we know), the first master s degree of this type in France > Present the framework, students, theoretical lessons and practical experiences > Present and discuss the issues and the difficulties of teaching and promoting web archiving in librarian or research courses

3 The framework: the digital archives master s degree > Master s degree of the National Superior School for Information Sciences and Librarianship (Enssib) > Main librarian school in France > One semester (October January), 180 hours alternating theoretical lessons and practical work > An internship to be done in the second half of the year > Five learning units > Imagining the digital archive > Digital publishing > Records management > Preserving and archiving digital documents > Harvesting web sites, referencing and accessing web archives

4 The students > Profile in humanities and social sciences > History, philosophy, literature > Expected jobs : digital humanities, digital curation / archiving, record management

5 Objectives of the learning unit on web archiving > Offer a broad overview of web archiving goals, stakeholders, and methods > Not only focusing on national library experience > Provide a practical experience on how to: > Define and constitute a corpus > Crawl websites according to chosen parameters > Use and promote archived websites > It was not an extensive training course on web archiving tools

6 The theoretical lessons > Presenting a broad panorama of Web Archiving initiatives > Legal deposit and heritage purposes: BnF and INA > Research driven archiving : Medialab of the French Institute for Political Sciences (Sciences Po) > Third party archiving: Internet Memory Foundation > Nothing on corporate archiving for legal purposes > Access and promotion of digital collections using semantic web > 18 hours of theoretical lessons 12 hours remaining for practical works

7 Practical experience : on selection side > Letting the students constitute a ready for harvesting corpus > Groups of 2 3 students > Corpus of manageable size: 20 to 40 URLs > Choosing a subject or a theme > With a significant and specific presence on the web > Allowing the selection of very different websites (from editorial point of view) > Related e.g. to a recent event or a local topic > Defining > Seed URL > Relevant descriptors (specific and to be chosen by the group) > Harvesting parameters (depth and frequency) > Filling a spreadsheet with this information

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10 Practical experience : on harvesting side > Review of web basics (HTML, URL, HTTP) and web sites architectures > Presentation of the different web archiving methods > server side > transactional > client side > how does it work > advantages/drawbacks > focus on web crawlers (exercizing with HTTrack) > software companies, non profits, online services > ARC and WARC formats (exercizing with wget)

11 Practical experience : on access side > The harder part of the training? > We can hardly explain to students how to install a Wayback Machine! > Viewing selected websites with IA s Wayback Machine (when possible) > Using the Gephi tool to visualize interactions between websites

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14 Results and futures directions > Globally, positive feedback from students > Working with local institutions to make the work even more concrete and to demonstrate its usefulness > Working with the local library? > Enssib located in Lyon > Main library of Lyon has a partnership with BnF for websites selection and harvesting > It will get a remote access to BnF web archives