Archiving the Internet.

• Author: Huelsbergen, Anselm
• Position: Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals - Book review

TITLE: Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals

AUTHOR: Adrian Brown

PUBLISHER: Facet Publishing

PUBLICATION DATE: 2006

LENGTH: 238 pages

PRICE: $99.95

SOURCE: www.amazon.com

Author Adrian Brown aims for Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals to serve as an "... introduction and overview, specifically for those who may be considering taking their first steps into the world of web archiving, or who may simply wish to gain an understanding of the issues." By shifting focus away from the specifics of web-archiving technology, which is where literature about preserving World Wide Web content has generally focused, Brown offers insights to facilitate an institution's decisions about and development of a web-archiving program.

His intended audience is institutional policymakers, information management professionals, and website owners or developers, and it is only to this last group that the book has little to offer. Brown, in light of his current position as head of digital preservation at the U.K. National Archives and prior work in the archives at the English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology, is well-suited to the task at hand. Indeed, much of the practical information and case studies presented in Archiving Websites derive from his experience at the National Archives and associated projects such as the U.K. Web Archiving Consortium and the technical registry of file formats, PRONOM.

The book consists of 10 chapters with endnotes, five short appendices, a glossary, and a bibliography. The first chapter briefly sketches out its organization. Chapter two ("The Development of Web Archiving") lays the foundation for much of what follows by discussing a number of organizations and their web-archiving initiatives. This short survey starts with the Internet Archive (1996) and concludes with the founding in 2003 of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. Brown uses these programs and initiatives throughout the book to illustrate his points and serve as specific case studies.

Chapters three through seven ("Selection," "Collection Methods," "Quality Assurance and Cataloguing," "Preservation" and "Delivery to Users") describe the stages of the "web archiving process."

The strength of Archiving Websites comes to the fore in the chapters on collection methods and preservation...