Digital Preservation Coalition

Web Archiving and Preservation Task Force

The DPC Web Archiving and Preservation Task Force will allow members to share best practice to support their local priorities. It will identify, examine and review current policy in web archiving and preservation. It will provide a mutually supportive environment for continued policy development for members and a mechanism through which non-members can engage with web archiving policy. In this way the Task Force will help to ensure that our generation can carve an appropriate legacy from the complexity and volatility of the web.

Terms of Reference

It is recognised that the rapid adoption of new technologies, the relative novelty of the problem and number of stakeholders involved inhibit the development of complementary policies for long term access to the Web.  Without such a policy framework there is a risk that limited resources are not targeted appropriately and that historically ‘significant’ websites are lost.

The Task Force will provide a forum in which members can share their experience, establish common goals and inform their own policy development.  Members will present organisational responses to emerging strategic challenges. Through discussion and negotiation they will support collaborative effort towards improved management of web archives.   Focussed, energetic and informed, the Task Force will not develop policy but will provide the framework in which members can refine and develop their own approaches to web archiving and preservation through shared experience and knowledge transfer.  

The Task Force will not take responsibility for service provision, will not attempt to create national policy and will not undertake tools or standards development, except to lobby for these as necessary. Members will be asked to articulate their responses to a number of shared challenges to discuss how these responses have emerged and their operational impact. In this way it will be possible to identify more clearly gaps in provision, technology and policy.  Areas of strength and weakness at an institutional and national level can be spotted – deploying our shared resources more strategically and constructing a more effective case for additional resources as required. Any recommendations that the Task Force makes are intended to inform policies and strategies with institutions.

Read the Full Terms of Reference and Roadmap for 2010-11 [425 kb pdf].

Membership currently includes representatives from:

• BBC
• British Library
• Digital Curation Centre
• JISC
• National Archives
• National Archives of Scotland
• National Library of Scotland
• National Library of Wales
• Parliamentary Archives
• Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
• Trinity College Library, Dublin
• University of London Computing Centre
• Wellcome Library