title: These Crawls can Talk. Context Information for Web Collections
creators: Susanne van den Eijkel Daniel Steinmeier
abstract: The National Library of the Netherlands has been harvesting the web since 2007. As is well known, an archived website is fundamentally different from a website on the live web. As a digital repository we create archival objects in the process of archiving, especially in the case of web harvesting since a website does not have clear boundaries. This means we define the limits ourselves. So how do we provide researchers with information on the choices we made during the process of selection, harvesting and ingest? How can we prove the integrity and authenticity of our web collections to our designated community? Based on the findings of Maemura et al. in 2018, three categories of information should be available for researchers of web collections: scope elements, process elements and context elements. This will help researchers understand what is present in a collection, what curatorial decisions have been made in the process and the reason behind the creation of the collection. In this article we will describe three documentation initiatives related to our web collections that we think could be seen as implementations of these three types of documentation elements.
keywords: preservation metadata context information webcollections