Collaborative Collection Development with Cobweb

The demands of archiving the web in comprehensive breadth or thematic depth easily exceed the capacity of any single institution.  To ensure that the limited resources of a given archival program are deployed most effectively, it is important that its curators know something about the collection development priorities and holdings of other, similarly-engaged institutions.  Cobweb, https://github.com/CobwebOrg/cobweb, will meet this need by supporting three key functions: nominating, claiming, and holdings.  The nomination function will let curators and stakeholders suggest web sites pertinent to specific thematic areas and provide seed-level descriptive metadata; the claiming function will allow archival programs to indicate an intention to capture some subset of nominated sites; and the holdings function will allow programs to document captured sites along with their collection-level description, structural and temporal scope, preservation policies, and terms of use.  Cobweb is a collaborative project of the CDL, Harvard University, and UCLA.  This presentation provides an update on project activities, as of July 2017.