Archiving the Israeli Web: the first phase of a pilot project Rivka Shveiky The Jewish National & University Library, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University and Judit Bar-Ilan Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem This project is part of a research project at the Department of Information Studies of Bar-Ilan University and is supported by the Jewish National & University Library of Israel (JNUL). The JNUL is Israel's national repository for all printed publications as well as those in audio-visual and stand-alone electronic format, but there is no legislation in Israel regarding the preservation of materials published on the Web. Since the Web is an extremely dynamic environment, there is an urgent need to address the problem. A number of National Libraries have already run pilots to find out what and how to preserve. A well-known project that tries to archive exhaustively is the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org). The national libraries, on the other hand, usually prefer selective preservation (see for example the Australian Pandora project (http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html). Selective preservation allows the projects to ask for permission from the creators of the sites to archive the materials, thus solving, at least partially, problems related to copyright. The first phase of our pilot project was extremely selective. Our aim was to assess the feasibility of archiving materials from the Israeli Web. At first an initial set of twenty sites related to the Israeli-Arab conflict were selected. One of the characteristics of the chosen sites was that the information provided by them did not exist in printed format. The owners of all these sites were approached, asking them for permission to archive their sites and to include the archived sites in the National Library’s catalogue. Eighteen sites granted permission. These sites were captured once a month six times between November 2003 and May 2004 using off-the-shelf capturing software (Offline Explorer by Metaproduct). The different versions of the captured sites are now part of the Jewish National Library’s collection (http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/IA/ArchivedSites/IA/FullList.html) and as such, the sites appear in the library’s catalog (see for example http://ram1.huji.ac.il/ALEPH/HEB/NNL/NNL/NNL/FIND-ACC/3334698). Note that cataloging Web sites is not a straightforward process. Care was taken to carefully follow cataloging rules. The process was aided by several members of the Library. Although we encountered some technical difficulties, these were less serious than a-priori expected, especially there were only minor problems related to Hebrew characters. In the future, we hope to extend the project and to carry out a larger scale pilot. At the first stage we concentrated on capturing, displaying the captured sites and cataloging the sites. At the next stage we intend to set up guidelines for the selection process and address the problem of maintaining long term accessibility to the archived sites.
