[-empyre-] Opening post

[Nancy McGovern <nm84@cornell.edu>]

Virtual Remote Control (http://irisresearch.library.cornell.edu/VRC/index.html) is our web archiving research project at Cornell.  It's a risk management approach we developed with research libraries in mind.  In developing collections that include or consist of web content,  the VRC approach wants to help curators select potential web resources of interest, assess those resources for relevance and potential durability, decide how actively they want to care about the resources, and respond to changes in web resources over time.  We've been out and about talking about VRC for some time now and, from the beginning, I've been struck by the number of digital art curators and artists who have expressed interest in VRC.  I've wondered if that's so because the model is intended to adapt to the individuality of web resources - perhaps I'll find out more about that this month.

So you know, VRC is a research project and we have not captured and preserved websites as part of our project, though we're heading in that direction.  Cornell University Library just started working on some test cases for capturing university websites and we're defining appropriate policies and procedures for websites: http://www.library.cornell.edu/iris/dpo/webarchiving.html

I'm interested in the posting on archiving - and there's another so I'll send this off and head out for the day.  We do a class project on the Internet Archive in our digital preservation management workshop (http://www.library.cornell.edu/iris/dpworkshop/) is on the Internet Archive - so I'll be very curious to see what people have to say.  For me, redundancy is a good thing for archiving - the more the merrier.

Nance