Web Archiving as a Task of National and Local History Bibliography

Abstract

The foreign experience of forming the majority of national web archives (in national libraries) and many accessible local history archives of public and university libraries has been analyzed due to the development of a model and methodology for electronic local history archives for Russian libraries.It is shown that the global activity on preserving network content is divided into national and regional segments and is national and local history in both contents. Its goals and structure fully fit into the classical forms and directions of national/local history bibliography, which turns out to be the key in all processes of selection and bibliographic processing of a new class of sources. For selection, all the criteria of connection with the country/region/territory, the place of production of the resource, its national language and content, characteristic of the national/local history bibliography; the selection itself is carried out by library specialists. The analysis has revealed the reasons why the preparation of the archived online content for use, regardless of the capabilities of automated technologies, in practice also requires the involvement of specialist in bibliography, the use of classical tools and methods of bibliographic description and indexing of content. The issue of choosing objects for archiving (sites, subdirectories, individual documents) is specially considered. The special significance, advantages and problems of treating individual documents are shown. The necessity of forming such web archiving strategies is substantiated, in which “starting points” are separate documents, and sites are evaluated and selected for productivity as their “containers”. Taking into account the global trends and the conditions of Russian libraries, a model of web archiving is proposed, the implementation of which, in the absence of a national repository and modern tools, will allow the beginning of accumulating some necessary experience and valuable network content.