Want to suggest a website to add to our collections? Interested in developing a web archive collection for a research project? Contact us through our request form.
For other inquiries, please email us directly at digitization.centre@ubc.ca.
The UBC Library references the following guidelines and best practices to guide our web archiving activities, and to ensure web content that contributes to the University’s research, teaching, and learning goals remains preserved and accessible over time.
The UBC Library's Web Archiving Team assess web content against the following criteria, to ensure that our web archiving resources are allocated effectively:
Partnerships
The Library seeks to remain an active member of groups such as the COPPUL Western Web Archiving Community, CARL Canadian Web Archiving Coalition, and the CGI-DPN (Canadian Government Information - Digital Preservation Network). We also endeavour to partner with other institutions on collaborative collection development and web archiving support projects where appropriate.
The Library’s web collections are primarily harvested, archived, and accessed through Archive-it, a web archiving service provided by the Internet Archive. Crawl frequency is dependent upon the regularity of updates to a website, and can change as required. Web content may also be archived through other software as necessary.
Where appropriate and feasible, the collected web content is made publicly available except when restricted by request of the website owner. Maintaining the content without restrictions will ensure that the archived content will remain openly accessible to UBC faculty, staff, students, and researchers, and to the wider community.
The Library respects the intellectual property rights and the proprietary rights of others. Copyright ownership remains with the owner(s) identified on the website, and as governed by local, national, and international laws and regulations. The Library also follows considerations of fair dealing and of the First Nations Principles of OCAPⓇ when developing its web archives.
The Library assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or lawfulness of the archived website content in our collections.
The UBC Library cannot authorize the use of the material, nor does it act as an intermediary with website owners on behalf of users. When reproducing and using material from the Library’s archived web collections, users are responsible for identifying the copyright status and terms of use of the website’s contents, and for identifying and contacting the appropriate authority for permission of re-use as appropriate.
Users should refer to the Library's copyright website for more information.
Where a website uses technological protection measures to restrict crawling technology, such as robots.txt files, the Library will not harvest the content without providing notification and/or securing permission, where feasible. The Library cannot and will not archive password-protected sites.
For websites outside of the UBC domain, the Library endeavours to make reasonable efforts to notify website owners that their site has been selected for inclusion in our web archives. If you are a website owner or someone with exclusive control over a site and you do not wish your website to be available through the Library’s collections, please contact us via our request form. All third-party requests for removal of content must be made via the website owner.
Note that the Library is only able to remove websites from public view that have been archived in the Library’s web archive collections. For sites that have been archived in the Wayback Machine, please see this Archive-it page for more information.