Ivy Plus Libraries Web Collecting Program

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research at participating Libraries and beyond. All thirteen Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation members participate in the Program.

Established in 2017, the Program was designed to reach across institutional lines and bolster collaborative collection building and thinking through web archiving. Web archives preserve vulnerable information that may disappear from the live web and capture the ways in which selected websites have evolved over time. The Confederation’s thematic collections are built from freely available websites and exclude content behind logins or paywalls. Program collections also exclude institutional content belonging to Confederation institutions, as all partner Libraries maintain at least one Archive-It account at the institutional level. Ultimately, the Program seeks to identify subjects of mutual interest around which to build collaborative collections and, in the process, avoid duplication and redundant collecting.

Most collections are crawled twice a year, though some feature irregular crawling frequencies (i.e. monthly) due to the nature of crawled content. All Confederation collections can be accessed permanently through Archive-It: https://archive-it.org/home/IvyPlus.

Web Collecting Advisory Committee

The Web Resources Collection Program is managed by the Confederation’s Web Resources Collection Librarian, Miranda Siler, is supported by Emily Uruchima, the Program’s Bibliographic Assistant, and is guided by the Web Collecting Advisory Committee, whose current members are: 

  • Alex Thurman, Columbia University;
  • Kizer Walker, Cornell University;
  • Sean Swanick, Duke University;
  • Matthew Benzing, Dartmouth College;
  • Pamela Graham, Columbia University;
  • Elizabeth Muller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You can contact the Committee by emailing [email protected].