Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers
Archiving the Websites of Contemporary Composers is a development collaboration led by NYU Libraries and funded with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Archive-It is working with the Libraries and NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program to archive web-based and born-digital audiovisual materials, and research and develop tools for their improved capture and discoverability.
Contemporary musical works and the rich secondary materials that accompany them are increasingly shared via the web. Together, NYU and Archive-It outlined a number of current challenges to capturing and replaying online multimedia, such as dynamic and transient URL generation and adaptive bitrate streaming, as well as a need for continued research and development around the integration of web archives and non-web collections.
These issues are addressed in two phases of our project. First, Archive-It is building tools to improve the crawling and capture of web-based audiovisual materials, addressing the increasing complexity of streaming audiovisual materials, especially on third-party hosting and sharing platforms. Our second area of work will explore methods to integrate discovery of high-quality, non-web multimedia content held in external repositories into the Archive-It platform. Linking Archive-It collections with non-web institutional content has great potential to integrate web and non-web archives. This work will build on NYU’s creation of an API for their preservation repository, Archive-It’s increased use of API-based systems integration in our latest software upgrade, and our continued work on improved content discovery for web collections.