Cornell Library investigates archiving Web-based political communications

Within the past decade the Internet has emerged as a vital channel of political communication. It now serves political parties, activists, popular fronts and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as a widely accessible and relatively unrestricted global message board. Through the World Wide Web, these groups can rapidly broadcast information to their constituents and publicly post critical documents, such as manifestoes, constitutions, declarations and treaties.

These communications are the digital-era counterparts of the posters, pamphlets and other forms of "street literature" that have long provided historians and policy analysts indispensable data on political activities and social and ideological trends. However, Web-based political communications tend to be produced sporadically and to change and disappear rapidly. Unless these digital messages can be preserved and archived in a format that will be accessible in years to come, their value as original source material for analysis and research will be lost.

Web archiving and digital preservation are key research areas at Cornell University Library (CUL). Over the next year, CUL will explore the best ways to collect and archive Web-based political communications. The project, which has been funded by a $445,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will help ensure the long-term availability of important political documents and messages disseminated via the Web by nongovernmental groups and parties. The project is coordinated by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and the participants include Cornell, New York University, Stanford University and the University of Texas-Austin, as well as the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

The participating universities maintain special collections of political resources that document Southeast Asia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and radical organizations in Europe. The Cornell research team will use a test set of approximately 50 Web sites selected for preservation by the curator of the Echols Collection on Southeast Asia, which is the largest library collection in North America on Southeast Asia.

The project will produce a framework and general specifications for ongoing, sustainable archiving in terms of long-term resource management, curatorial practices and technological requirements.

For information about the project at Cornell, visit www.library.cornell.edu/iris/research/projects.html or contact Nancy McGovern at nm84@cornell.edu.