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Re: Archiving Websites



Robert Breslawski wrote:
> Once captured in PDF, converting it to images and outputing to a long term preservation media (LE
> 500) such as microfilm should be considered.  This is relatively easy to do these days and is low
> cost insurance to prevent equipment/software obsolescence problems.

I would say that the viability of this approach depends strongly on the type of content, the reason
for its preservation and what the expected use scenarios will be.  If one hopes to retain the pages
for a very long time but assumes that they will be accessed only very rarely and then only by those
physically visiting the archives, then microfilm could be helpful.  Microfilm, however, lacks many of
the qualities of the original digital object, such as searchability, following of links, remote
computer access, etc.  Future research will most likely include a lot of data mining, analysis and
repurposing of materials, which will depend on digital forms.  Microfilm can always be re-digitized in
the future, but the translation back to a digital form will fail to reflect a lot of properties of
properties of Web materials that simply cannot be represented on standard preservation microfilm, such
as color, dynamic rendering, animation, sound, video, non-linear navigation, behavioral aspects.  Many
genres of Web materials depend heavily on the digital medium in order to retain their informational
and evidential value.

There are technical issues, such as how to represent Web sites as a series of static pages.  At what
resolution should it be rendered?  How should pages that wrap across multiple screens be reflected on
film?  How is the structure of the site to be represented, when the destination of links is no longer
reflected (nor will all links even be known, since not all links are underlined text and not all
underlined text is a link)?  Storage costs are also certainly a consideration if large numbers of
pages are going to be preserved.  If we assume, for example, that the average page size since 1996 has
been about 10,000 bytes (based on the Internet Archive's numbers), then the hard drive storage for
even 10 million pages (100 gigabytes) costs only a couple hundred dollars now, and this price is
falling at an exponential rate.  Even if one could fit each page onto a single frame (which is
extremely unlikely, except for the most simple and brief pages), 10 million frames of film still takes
up a lot of environmentally controlled storage space, at a cost that is increasing over time rather
than dropping.  While small collection projects may not be capturing millions of pages, it's quite
likely that many repositories will be doing so.  Building and preserving a useful analog index to the
filmed pages would also not be a trivial or cheap task.

Though microfilm could possibly be a safe secondary preservation medium for some Web materials, I
think there are many cases in which it would fail to be sufficient as the primary preservation
approach.

=========================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan             Phone: 734-647-0505
 School of Information
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
   "To the extent that archival organizations are concerned
    with current record practices and the content of future
    holdings, they cannot long delay plans for appraising,
    accessioning, and servicing this new [computer] media
    of communication."
                                  - Meyer Fishbein, 1970

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