Archiving the Web: A Case Study from the University of Victoria

The University of Victoria Libraries started archiving websites in 2013, and it quickly became apparent that many scholarly websites being produced by faculty, especially in the digital humanities, were going to prove very challenging to effectively capture and play back. This article will provide an overview of web archiving and explore the considerable legal and technical challenges of implementing a web archiving initiative at a research library, using the University of Victoria's implementation of Archive-it, a web archiving service from the Internet Archive, as a case study, with a special focus on capturing complex, interactive websites that scholars are creating to disseminate their research in new ways.