Archiving the web

The University of Toronto Library is now a subscriber to Archive-It, a service created by the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive was founded to preserve the content of part of the Web by building an "Internet library", and since 1996 it has offered free access for researchers, historians, and scholars to collections that exist in digital format. At present the Archive contains 50 billion pages and over 50 million websites, and is growing at a rate of 20 terabytes of data per month. The Archive is accessed by typing a URL, and selecting a date range This general web archive presents a broad ‘snapshot’ of the Internet at a specific period of time.

Archive-It allows an individual institution to create smaller and more focused web collections, and to harvest data from websites at regular, specific times, chosen by the institution. The University of Toronto Library has created three distinct Web archives called "collections". Harvesting is accomplished using base URLs and all sites linked to the base site are archived. Rather than being accessible only by URL, all of these collections are full-text searchable and all are available to interested researchers.

The three collections are:

Canadian Labour Unions
Administered by the Industrial Relations Library

Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups
Administered by the Collection Development Department, UTL

University of Toronto Web Archives
Administered by the University of Toronto Archives & Records Management Services
 

For further information please write to Don McLeod, don.mcleod@utoronto.ca.