The University of Manitoba website, circa 1997.
November 7 is World Digital Preservation Day. This year’s theme is “At-Risk Digital Materials”. For the University of Manitoba Libraries’ Digital Strategies team, this means ensuring that the University maintains access to digital assets important to its history and operation before that content is lost. So, what are some examples of at-risk digital assets at the University of Manitoba? You might have noticed that the University of Manitoba website looks a bit different these days with the launch of the new website in August 2019. While we don’t often think of websites as records in the more traditional sense, they are important to preserve and include valuable information for University students, faculty, staff, alumni, as well as researchers, historians, and the public more generally.
For this reason, the Libraries' Digital Strategies team has been working with the Next Generation Web Experience team to ensure that all old webpages are archived prior to being replaced with new content. To web archive, the University of Manitoba Libraries uses Archive-It, a web archiving service that crawls websites and makes them available through the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization and "one of the world's largest public digital libraries", made up in part of 430 billion webpages (Internet Archive Projects). Through this service, the U of M website is regularly crawled to capture content changes. Ensuring that changes to the website are captured before and after they occur is particularly challenging as websites are ephemeral documents that are in a constant state of flux. A website might even be changed while the archiving process has already begun, meaning that a freshly crawled website may already be out of date by the time the crawl is complete. The type of content displayed on a website can also pose a challenge for web archiving. Crawling technologies still struggle to capture dynamic content, such as content that requires user interaction. This might include maps that allow you to zoom in and out or move to different locations, content requiring the user to click through various prompts to proceed, such as a play button on a video, password protected webpages, or online fillable forms, among other content. While the technology isn't yet perfected, it still allows users to browse old versions of the University of Manitoba's website going as far back as 1997!
Are you feeling nostalgic for old University of Manitoba webpage content? Check out the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and search for archived webpages of the U of M website. Happy browsing!
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