So, when I talk to faculty about preserving scholarship, I often find that their concern is less about preservation of their written work (PDFs, .Docs) but more about preservation of their websites and other online media they’ve developed with and for students. While an institutional repository can provide persistent access to discrete files, it doesn’t do a very good job of capturing the usability and functionality of complete websites. That is where Archive-It comes in.
Archive-It, a subscription-based service provided by Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, captures snapshots of websites and emulates functionality so a user can visit a previous version of a particular website. The solution utilizes a suite of web-based products to run crawls and capture web snapshots for later archiving. The only current downside – aside from it being a for-fee solution ;) – is that it does not capture dynamic content from online databases.
