What is web archiving and why has MOCA GA established a web archiving program?
Websites are ephemeral, and often considered at-risk born-digital content. New websites pop up daily, URL’s and content change continuously, and websites may disappear completely. Materials that used to appear in print are increasingly published online, and therefore some web content important for the study of Georgia artists and art history, might easily be lost to future researchers. MOCA GA seeks to address this problem by curating a digital collection of archived web sites and pages, thereby preserving online materials associated with Georgia art, Georgia artists, and MOCA GA programs, ensuring accessibility to future generations.
Web archiving is achieved through the use of internet bots, or software programs that “crawl” across webpages, indexing materials. These tools are used to collect portions of the World Wide Web in order to ensure the information is preserved in an archive such as archive-it.org or the Wayback Machine for future researchers, historians, and the public.
Web crawlers do not affect the performance or accessibility of existing websites. The MOCA GA web archives initiatives simply create cataloging records via archive-it.org of existing sites and pages, and link these resources to the MOCA GA web archives collection, increasing the visibility of websites and web pages (in their current “live” version and/or historical version to the scholarly community).
In 2021 MOCA GA received the first year of a two-year subscription donation from Archive-It to begin exploring a Georgia arts web archiving program. As one of the founding members of CARTA (Collaborative ART Archive) we will continue to archive Georgia art and artist-related websites as resources become available, either using the Archive-It subscription or via the CARTA collaboration. For more information, or to nominate an at-risk Georgia arts-related website, please email stacey@mocaga.org.