The following is a guest post from Abbie Grotke, Web Archiving Team Lead, Library of Congress and Co-Chair of the NDSA Content Working Group.

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance is pleased to release a report of a 2013 survey of Web Archiving institutions (PDF) in the United States.

A bit of background: from October through November of 2013, a team of National Digital Stewardship Alliance members, led by the Content Working Group, conducted a survey of institutions in the United States that are actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the web. This survey built upon a similar survey undertaken by the NDSA in late 2011 and published online in June of 2012. Results from the 2011-2012 NDSA Web Archiving Survey were first detailed in May 2, 2012 in “Web Archiving Arrives: Results from the NDSA Web Archiving Survey” on The Signal, and the full report (PDF) was released in July 2012.

The goal of the survey was to better understand the landscape of web archiving activities in the U.S. by investigating the organizations involved, the history and scope of their web archiving programs, the types of web content being preserved, the tools and services being used, access and discovery services being provided and overall policies related to web archiving programs. While this survey documents the current state of U.S. web archiving initiatives, comparison with the results of the 2011-2012 survey enables an analysis of emerging trends. The report therefore describes the current state of the field, tracks the evolution of the field over the last few years, and forecasts future activities and developments.

The survey consisted of twenty-seven questions (PDF) organized around five distinct topic areas: background information about the respondent’s organization; details regarding the current state of their web archiving program; tools and services used by their program; access and discovery systems and approaches; and program policies involving capture, availability and types of web content. The survey was started 109 times and completed 92 times for an 84% completion rate. The 92 completed responses represented an increase of 19% in the number of respondents compared with the 77 completed responses for the 2011 survey.

Overall, the survey results suggest that web archiving programs nationally are both maturing and converging on common sets of practices. The results highlight challenges and opportunities that are, or could be, important areas of focus for the web archiving community, such as opportunities for more collaborative web archiving projects. We learned that respondents are highly focused on the data volume associated with their web archiving activity and its implications on cost and the usage of their web archives.

Based on the results of the survey, cost modeling, more efficient data capture, storage de-duplication, and anything that promotes web archive usage and/or measurement would be worthwhile investments by the community. Unsurprisingly, respondents continue to be most concerned about their ability to archive social media, databases and video. The research, development and technical experimentation necessary to advance the archiving tools on these fronts will not come from the majority of web archiving organizations with their fractional staff time commitments; this seems like a key area of investment for external service providers.

We hope you find the full report interesting and useful, whether you are just starting out developing a web archiving program, have been active in this area for years, or are just interested in learning more about the state of web archiving in the United States.