GW Web Archives Program

Purpose

The Web Archive Program at the George Washington University was initiated in 2014 with the purpose of capturing websites of relevance to the university, and the library’s special collections. GW uses the Internet Archive’s widely adopted collecting tool, Archive-It, to collect and archive web data on both a scheduled and per-request basis. The Web Archiving Program aims to collect university related websites, as well as websites that complement or expand on collections held by the university archives. Websites are captured exactly in the way they appeared at the time the crawl was initiated; these captures cannot be changed or altered. Time stamps and “HTTP” requests are recorded by Archive-It and help authenticate the captures. Websites archived by the Web Archive Program can be accessed by visiting the George Washington University’s page on Archive-it.

What is Web Archiving?

Web archiving refers to the process of collecting data from websites on the internet, preserving that data, and ensuring its availability for future generations. Web archiving practices began as early as 1996 as the internet’s ephemerality became evident.1 Brewster Kahle, the founder of Internet Archive, suggests that the typical lifespan of a web page is approximately 100 days. This is likely because websites are designed to be dynamic documents, constantly evolving and being updated.2 When content is being updated and lost at such an alarming rate, we risk losing our digital memory and organizational accountability; especially when more of our daily lives take place over the internet. Archiving the web, however, poses a variety of challenges including economic, legal, ethical, and technical challenges, making archiving the web a community effort

Participate in GW Web Archives Program

GW Community members (faculty, staff, students) may request web crawls for GW webpages and GW-affiliated webpages via the request form for archiving GW-affiliated webpages.

Supporting Documents/Resources

  1. Niu, Jinfang. “An Overview of Web Archiving.” D-Lib Magazine 18, no. 3/4 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1045/march2012-niu1 ↩

  2. Anthony, Adoghe, Kayode Onasoga, Dike U. Ike, and Olujimi Ajayi. “Web Archiving: Techniques, Challenges, and Solutions.” International Journal of Management & Information Technology 5, no. 3 (2013): 598-603. ↩

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