Kathryn Stine
Manager, Digital Content Development and Strategy
California Digital Library
The demands of archiving the web in comprehensive breadth or thematic depth easily exceed the capacity of any single institution. As such, collaborative approaches to web archiving are necessary, and their success relies on curators understanding both what has already been archived, by whom, and how. With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Cobweb (a joint project of the California Digital Library, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard University) supports three key functions of collaborative collection development: suggesting nominations, asserting claims, and reporting holdings. Curators establish thematic collecting projects in Cobweb and encourage nominators to suggest relevant web sites as candidates for archiving. For any given project, archival programs can claim their intention to capture a subset of nominated sites. Cobweb interacts with external data sources to populate a holdings registry, aggregating metadata about existing collections and crawled sites to support curators in planning future collecting activity and researchers in exploring archived web resources useful to their research. This project briefing will include a progress update on Cobweb development, a demonstration of Cobweb prototype interfaces, a summary of stakeholder feedback gathered thus far, and opportunities to engage in discussion about collaborative digital collection development.