All of the Above: Multi-purpose Donor Forms for Web Archives

Rotunda / Garden of the Sea

Drawing upon interdisciplinary literature, particularly from the field of user experience, this project presents potential considerations in donor form creation and revision for web archiving initiatives. Using the University of Arkansas Special Collections’ form development as a case study, this poster presents a survey of current practices and templates, as well as highlights areas for future research and development, such as options for increased automation. In expanding its web archiving program from University websites to include the web presence of external community organizations, UA Special Collections ran into the need for more extensive donor forms. At the same time, however, the typical donor profile expanded considerably as well, necessitating different considerations in language and scope. Questions were developed with three goals in mind: 1) permissions and rights documentation; 2) donor-created metadata (in the form of technical and historical background information); and 3) anticipatory troubleshooting (regarding known weaknesses of the web archiving software). A donor form also presents an opportunity for donor education—an opportunity to let donors know about the strengths and limitations of the tools we use, and about what they can expect in terms of playback and user experience—so methods of facilitating this information exchange are also explored.