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WebArchiv contains 15,5 terabytes of data. Harvesting began on 3/9/2001.


FINAL REPORT

CLT2005/A1/CZ-77 – Web Cultural Heritage


Summary:


The project “Web Cultural Heritage“ began 25th September 2005 and ended 24th September 2006 and brought many positive results. Project team was formed of specialists coming from four European states – Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia.


The project was successful in a variety of areas. Many of the internet resources (literature art, science etc.) have lasting value and significance, and therefore they present a heritage that should be protected and preserved for current and future generations. The aim of this project – to create a selection guideline allowing cultural heritage institutions to select the most important and valuable internet resources was achieved.


At first, partner institutions analysed existing methods and selection policy in different parts of the world and created their own proposals. These were subsequently discussed at the meetings and based on the results the final guideline – General Recommendations were prepared. Partners appreciated this guideline as a very useful document which can be applied in any country and the project as helpful for their web archiving development (see Annex 1).


The technical issues were the second area of the project which resulted in the General Recommendations concerning selection criteria. Harvesting rules had been specified for harvesting websites using different web harvesters. 30 representative websites from each of the 4 participating countries were selected and the total sum of 120 URLs formed the seed list for later harvesting by three kinds of harvesting tools available – by Heritrix, HTTrack and WebBird (incorrectly called WebCrawler in the Grant Application which is a part of Agreement). Despite some problems with Slovenian URLs, it was possible to compare the harvests on a website level and partly on a mimetype level as well.


All partners worked very hard to accomplish the objectives of the project. Everybody worked responsibly and effectively from the very beggining. This partnership was significant as the new phase of European co-operation and raised awareness of the need for digital preservation, i.e. the need to take steps to capture and preserve at–risk digital content that is vital to our European´s history.


The results of the project were presented at the 6th International Web Archiving Workshop held in Alicante, Spain, 21–22 September 2006 as part of the 10th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries http://www.iwaw­.net/06/PDF/i­waw06-zabicka.pdf (see Annex 3).


The results of the selection policy analysis and of the IT activities are described in details in publication prepared as an output of this project to present the project results. This publication is enclosed to this project report (see Annex 4). Besides, all materials gathered up by team partners, the drafts of recommendations for Selection Criteria, information on harvesting and archive analysis as well as the presentation of the project at the IWAW 2006 workshop are available at the project website http://www.we­barchiv.cz/cul­ture-2000/ under the Documents section (see Annex 2).


Problems and solutions
During the project a few difficulties occured. Some of them were easy to cope with, other required more time to sort out.

Personnel situation
At the last moment the fact that Slovenian and Estonian team have only one person instead of planned two persons that could participate in most of activities (especially meetings) came out. The reason was participation of these two countries in some other European projects.

Financial situation
The financial difficulties were connected with personnel situation. Money amounts were planned for two persons from each country in the budget. There were also planned higher amounts of money for subsistence allowance or hotel expences than it was needed to spend.
The beneficiary planned the budget on the basis of the official schedule – „The daily allowance rates accepted by the Commission for staff on mission“ – published on Culture2000 website but in fact in each of the involved countries these rates are far smaller than the sum given in the budget.
The beneficiary took advantage of the possibility to adjust the estimated budget by transfers between items of eligible costs. More money was spent for expenditures within the chapters 4 and 6, less money was used in chapters 2 and 5. The transfer did not exceed 20% of the amount of each item of estimated eligible costs.

Information situation
First two activities of the project and the main objective – Selection guideline were based on acquiring information from public available resources. Nevertheless, this showed as insufficient. Because of this 3 important international conferences were chosen to visit. They were great opportunity to get essential information and to discuss some questions of the project with international experts.

Organizational situation
Some organizational issues occured which needed to be cleared up. That is why Estonian team came to Prague in November 2005 and Slovak team came to visit INFORUM conference in Prague (May 2006)) connected with the Czech partners discussions

Technical situation
At the beggining of the project, the partners institutions had totally different technical and technological facilities progress. The Czech team was the most experienced one and it assisted the partners (especially Slovak team) to identify their national webspace and also help them to set the technical parameters. For this reason Slovak team came to Brno (Masaryk University) in April to learn more about hardware and software tools.

Main objectives achieved in the project:

• link institutions from four countries and start an exchange of experience (meetings, online discussions)
• enable contacts with experts from other countries (conference, online discussions)
• provide a list of selection criteria (selection guideline) respecting European requirements based on performed analysis
• provide adjusted software tools
• provide best practice report to enable the cultural heritage institutions (particularly national libraries) to help in carrying out their tasks of preserving digital cultural heritage

List of Annexes:


ANNEX 1: Collaboration between partners (.pdf)
ANNEX 2: Project website (.pdf)
ANNEX 3: IWAW presentation (.ppt)

Publication presenting the project:


Can be ordered at National Library of the Czech Republic (webarchiv@nkp­.cz).



WebArchiv
Contact: webarchiv@nkp.cz
Last update: 8/9/2010