Web Archiving: Web Archiving at VT

The Virginia Tech Web Archive is located at  https://www.archive-it.org/collections/5315.

• The Virginia Tech Web Archive (VTWA) is crawled using Archive-It, created by the Internet Archive.
• The VTWA was created in February 2015.
• Crawls are managed by the Digital Preservation Coordinator.
• Crawls are performed biannually and as needed.
• The scope covers the Virginia Tech domain (vt.edu).
• The scope of the crawl searches for hyperlinks four levels from the original seed.
• The web archive is publicly available.
• Requests for adding a seed to the Web Archive can be directed to the Digital Preservation Coordinator.
• WARC files are also ingested into VTechWorks as needed, such as for Creative Technologies theses.

There are some websites that the Virginia Tech University Libraries (VTUL) will only capture once for research, grant requirements, or other purposes that do not require long-term capture or for resources that are now static. The Farm Girl at Large collection (https://archive-it.org/collections/6147) is one of these examples maintained by VTUL that is public but is not active.

The VTWA utilizes Archive-It, a subscription web archiving service developed by the Internet Archive. The VTWA is available to the public and can be browsed and searched by keyword. Page text of the captured website can also be searched. Clicking into a seed URL will lead you to many capture versions that can be explored like a typical web page.

We are currently working to create additional metadata per the Web Archiving Metadata schema developed by OCLC. The goal of is to increase searchability and discoverability. More information will be recorded here as updates are implemented.

Several other web archiving initiatives are active at VTUL.

Virginia Tech is leading a grant-funded project to make web archives more valuable to researchers (July 2018): 

"The Institute of Museum and Library Services recently awarded a $248,451 grant for a collaborative two-year project, Continuing Education to Advance Web Archiving, that will create materials to teach librarians and archivists across the world how to collect, extract, and analyze archived information from the world wide web. Zhiwu Xie, director of digital library development for the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, is leading the team of library and archive experts." 

The Virginia Tech Web Archive is not the only Virginia Tech web archive hosted on Archive-It. The Virginia Tech Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery Network currently manages over 65 archives on Archive-It that can be found at https://archive-it.org/organizations/156. More information on the Global Event and Trend Archive Research can be found on their website at  http://eventsarchive.org/.