The Presidential Library first in the country began building online archive

The Presidential Library was the first institution in Russia, which began building an of web archive of Internet resources of Russian organizations and institutions to prevent their irretrievable disappearance and assure information retaining. This was announced at the plenary session of the VIII Scientific and Practical Conference dedicated to “Cultural heritage: integration of the resources in the digital environment”, which took place from the 3rd to the 6th of October 2017 in the historical building on 3 Senate Square within the framework of an Annual integration forum of the Presidential Library.

The General Director of the Presidential Library Alexander Vershinin welcomed the participants of the plenary session stressing out a significance of this event: “Along the course of the Integration Forum the plans for digitization are being refined, new information sources are getting published, various discussions and working groups, methodological seminars and master classes are being held, the Academic Council has met to examine the conceptual and methodological issues of preservation and use of audiovisual documents, to review the development of multimedia and web resources, and to set objectives for the preparation of our upcoming spring Outreach and Legal Forum 2018.”

The Presidential Library pays special attention to web archiving, work on which has begun in 2017. Exclusiveness of such new direction for the institution is in the fact that at the moment that kind of work at the state level is not being lead in any institution in Russia, unlike abroad, where such major players as the Library of Congress of the United States, the British Library, the National Library of France do work on building the Internet archives.

While choosing the resources for web archiving, the priority directions of the Presidential Library’s areas of expertise were fully considered, focusing on the history of Russian statehood and law and the Russian language as the state language of the Russian Federation. Therefore, the websites of state authorities were chosen for archiving first of all. Today, the Presidential Library consistently archives such resources as the official site of the President of Russia kremlin.ru and the official website of the Government of Russian Federation government.ru. It stands to mention that a new backup copy is issuing every day, which makes it possible to see how the site changed over the time.

Another important criterion for choosing the resources for web archiving was its fragility. It is necessary to preserve materials that very likely will soon disappear from the Internet environment in such form in which they are present their now. This includes, among other things, projects that have a certain period of lifetime, after which these resources will not remain in service. Within the framework of the pilot project, the choice was made in favor of the resources dedicated to the Year of Ecology in Russia announced in 2017. Among the already amassed in the Presidential Library information is official website of the Year of Ecology along with dedicated to it section of the official TASS website and official documents, etc.

With a process of web archiving the Presidential Library takes a very responsible attitude to copyright compliance. In this regard, only those sites that are under an open license are being archived, in other cases the negotiations may be held with the right holders for permission to save the content of these resources in the Presidential Library stock.

The new direction of the Presidential Library is currently very important due to the rapid development and change of the digital space. The creation of such web archives will enable users to explore the history of the Russian Internet, to obtain the information of disappeared sites, to use as the evidences the information from such websites, make references to archival copies and much more.