Call for Abstracts: Active Solutions for Preserving Internet Content

The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is a consortium of libraries, archives, museums, universities, and other organizations actively involved in collecting content from the World Wide Web, who have decided to work together to find effective ways to collect, manage, preserve and provide access to their web heritage.

On October 7, 2009, the IIPC will sponsor a free, one-day event, “Active Solutions for Preserving Internet Content,” at the California Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California. This IIPC event immediately follows iPRES 2009, the 6th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, held at the Mission Bay Conference Center on October 5-6.

Many digital preservation managers, already challenged by preservation requirements, strategies, workflows, and repositories, must now consider web archives as a new type of collection to be acquired, stored, preserved and made accessible. This event has been organized to take advantage of the synergy between the wide-ranging preservation interests of the iPRES community and the focused interest and work of the IIPC community in preserving web archives – an opportunity to learn from each other, contribute to each other’s work, recognize common needs and shine the slanting light of difference on each other’s perspectives.

Current priority areas of interest to the IIPC preservation community will be highlighted, as well as present work being developed with active solutions related to web archives.

The event organizing committee invites proposals from all interested IIPC member institutions, as well as other researchers, work teams and individuals working on the preservation of web archives. Proposals for presentations, panel sessions, debates or other ways of engaging the interest of an audience in the following focus areas will be considered. Formal papers will not be required, but the committee would like to receive proposal abstracts no later than ~~July 1, 2009,~~ (extended to July 8, 2009) with the program to be finalized by August 1, 2009.

Possible topics

The nature of web archives from a preservation perspective: contexts, scenarios, preservation pluses and minuses
Big enablers: metadata (PREMIS, etc.), METS, significant properties, the WARC format and WARC tools
Storage of massive data loads; distributed storage
Are emulation or migration feasible preservation strategies?
Community information tools that might support preservation of web archives; format registries
Workflows that support preservation; the role of ‘regular’ preservation tools and methods; maintenance and ‘preservation action’; repository requirements
Integrating preservation of web archives with preservation of other content types
Managing, organizing, resourcing, planning, measuring preservation
Working together, and future priorities

Key Dates

Closed: Submission of abstracts
August 1, 2009: Notification of acceptance
September 18, 2009: Presentation slides due
October 7, 2009: “Active Solutions for Preserving Internet Content” Event

Format and Submission
Abstracts submissions period is now closed. For selected presentations, no papers will be required but presentation slides (if used) will be due on September 18, 2009.
Abstracts and presentation slides will be distributed to attendees and the public after the event, on the IIPC website.

Event Registration
Registration is free but space is limited. Please fill out this form to register. Contact if you have any questions about the event.