Reading
Readers are encouraged to browse the following material, which complements the text presented in this section.
Web Archive File Format (WARC)
This website describes the WARC format for web archives, which is used to save the results obtained from web crawlers. It allows multiple digital resources to be aggregated into an archive. WARC is recognized as a standard for web archiving by many library systems.
View: Web Archive File Format (WARC)
Clara Barton Papers
This website is an example of an archive consisting of digitized copies of an entire archival collection – in this case, the collected papers of American nursing pioneer and leader Clara Barton (1821 – 1912). The archive is a digital surrogate of a large, analog collection, as the materials are organized and arranged in the same manner as the physical archive located at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Hypertext, hyperlinks, and other digital tools facilitate navigation, searching, and analysis.
There are a great number of publicly accessible archives with intuitive, stimulating interfaces that provide powerful and effective search and analysis tools for researchers. The following two websites are exemplary.
View: Clara Barton Papers
The Rossetti Archive
The Rossetti Archive is an example of a digital hypermedia archive. Its purpose is to collect, aggregate, and organize the complete writings and pictorial works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), an English poet and artist. The archive provides scholars with access to a large, contextualized corpus of materials encoded for searching and analysis.
View: The Rossetti Archive
The William Blake Archive
The archive contains a vast collection of materials, including books, book illustrations, drawings, paintings, prints, and manuscripts and typographic works. Like the Rossetti Archive, the purpose of the archive “was to develop a sort of ever-growing hypertext aggregation of related digital copies of sources anchored around an individual” (Owens & Padilla, 2021).
The following material is optional. However, interested readers are encouraged to peruse it.
Archival Materials. A Practical Definition
Peter Van Garderen
January 22, 2007
This weblog post by digital archivist and software developer Peter Van Garderen argues that the purpose of archival material is twofold: Its primary purpose is “amnesia prevention” or “memory aid” – allowing those present or with first-hand experience of an event, time, or place to recall or to mentally re-experience that time, event, or place. The other purpose is to be a proxy for those who were not so present. In this case, archival material communicates information in such a way that they can experience details of the event or to convey a sense of it. Van Garderen also notes that even digital archives have a limited lifespan, and that preservation paradigms are needed. He cites computer scientist and digital archive specialist Jeff Rothenberg: “digital information lasts forever—or five years, whichever comes first”.
Read: Archival Materials. A Practical Definition
What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers
Trevor Owens
February 27, 2014
Trevor Owens, Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress, presents a thorough discussion of the types of archives and their meanings in this weblog post on the Library of Congress website. In addition to working definitions of the various types of archives, the post introduces and discusses web archives and digital archives. Many helpful hyperlinks provide readers with examples illustrating various points, and assist the reader by in clarifying unfamiliar concepts.
Read: What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers