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Please join the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group during ALA Annual Conference
in Washington D.C. for a presentation and Q&A on the *Library of Congress
Web Archiving Program* on *Sunday, June 23, 2019, 9:00-10:00AM, *Marriott
Marquis, Archives Room during our regular scheduled meeting. The speakers
are Rick Fitzgerald, Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate of
the Library of Congress, and Grace Thomas, Digital Collections Specialist
for the Library of Congress. We are looking forward to seeing you all in
Washington, D.C. *Be sure to add this event to your** ALA Conference
Scheduler*
<https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/ALA-Annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=519079>
.



The Library of Congress Web Archiving program, in existence since 2000, has
had varying approaches over the years related to creating metadata records
and making them accessible. While the program has been in a state of
continuous evolution since its inception, the past six years have seen
significant advancement in how the Library conceptualizes a web archive,
and is therefore able to describe it.



This re-conceptualization was integral for assigning appropriate
permissions to archived web content and indeed led to more accurate
description. However, the implementation was part of an overall system
migration and was lengthy, resulting in a backlog of over 4,000
undescribed, inaccessible web archives. Additionally, with the Library’s
2017 Digital Collecting Plan, which calls for an expansion of web
archiving, the Library’s event and thematic web archive collections have
only continued increasing in number, depth, and breadth.



Their talk will explain the recent history of web archives description at
the Library of Congress, the process to implement a new model of
description, outline the current model represented publicly as Metadata
Object Description Schema (MODS) records incorporated into the loc.gov Solr
index, share the process and triumph of clearing the backlog, set our work
among other institutions participating in web archiving and description of
web archives, and finally look toward the future in describing research
projects we hope will enhance our description.





Speaker Bios:



Rick Fitzgerald is a Librarian in the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access
Directorate of the Library of Congress. He has been the primary cataloger
for the Library of Congress Web Archives since 2010, and has taken an
active role in many of its transitions over the past several years.



Grace Thomas became a Digital Collections Specialist for the Library of
Congress Web Archiving Team in August 2016. Currently, many of her tasks
revolve around streamlining ways to facilitate description of and access to
resources in the Library’s 1.7 petabyte web archive.



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Anne Washington, Metadata Services Coordinator

University Libraries

University of Houston

713-743-3038

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*Pronouns: she/her/hers*