Web Archiving at the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC): Collaboration to preserve specialist born-digital art resources

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In late-2013 the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), consisting of the research libraries and archives of three leading art museums in New York City (the Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Art Reference Library of the Frick Collection, and the Museum of Modern Art), implemented a program for web archiving born-digital specialist art and art historical resources. In the three years following the initiation of NYARC's collaborative web archiving program, ten collections of archived art websites have seen steady growth, with particular focus on archiving the websites of the institutions themselves, sites pertaining to New York City galleries, and those of born-digital catalogues raisonnés. NYARC works in partnership with the Internet Archive's Archive-It service to build their web archive collections and harvest web content, as well as partners with those in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) community to raise awareness about the inherent need for preservation of ephemeral borndigital materials of high risk of disappearance from the live web. NYARC has pioneered the archiving of born-digital catalogue raisonné, with the collection of catalogue raisonné in Archive-It now including 40 discreet projects. NYARC's overall web archive collections now encompass approximately 3,900 sites. While web archiving is still considered an "emerging" area of focus for collection development within libraries and archives, preservation of borndigital materials remains absolutely crucial to future scholarship. Digital art history in particular depends upon the existence and accessibility of these web-native ephemeral materials, with the many use cases for web archive collections by independent scholars only just being considered as big data analysis gains momentum in the humanities. Additionally, given the rapid rate at which citations for web-based materials within scholarly publications suffer from "link rot" or drifting URLs, it is especially pertinent that web archiving becomes a more prominent practice within cultural heritage institutions, universities, and in collaboration with the GLAM community.