NLM to Broaden Its Institutional Web Site Archiving

Under a Web permanence policy established in 2002, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) recorded permanence metadata within HTML headers, performed pre-publication appraisal and review by NLM archivists, and maintained version control for deleted and updated content. This was a novel, but time-consuming approach to communicating which NLM Web sites would be kept permanently available and whether the contents and identifiers of those documents could change over time, and to ensuring that access to important NLM content was not eliminated by disappearing links.

Based on recent experience gained in the use of Web archiving technologies for gathering Web content, NLM will be broadening and simplifying its approach to archiving its own Web sites. Like many other institutions, NLM will begin using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It Web archiving service to capture and preserve periodic snapshots of a wider landscape of NLM Web resources. Concurrently, NLM will cease the application and management of its previous permanence policy to individual Web pages and documents. NLM will still maintain the existing commitments to those Web resources previously identified as Permanent. The NLM Technical Services Division will continue to catalog NLM Web resources.

NLM is confident that its new approach to archiving its institutional Web sites, integrated with its external Web crawling activities, will provide a richer and deeper historical record of NLM programs, activities, and services.