For Artist and Community Web Archives

Websites are notoriously fragile and archiving them can be a difficult task. They are closely tied not only to the community that runs them, but also to the infrastructure that hosts them. Creating web archives is becoming an increasingly popular activity, and there are many tools available for web archiving. However, hosting and maintaining web archives is still a relatively rare phenomenon. Many government archives and libraries are faced with the daunting task of ensuring the integrity of each archived website, and the agency of authors, artists, designers, builders and creators of websites can't be maintained or even considered when dealing with large numbers. There are a growing number of smaller-scale initiatives that provide a necessary, though certainly far from perfect, counterpoint. These include net art archives run by nonprofits, netizen initiatives such as the web archives of community servers, and citizen-activist initiatives to save the online cultural heritage of war-torn places. The article discusses some of the challenges of archiving websites using the example of Art Doc Web, a prototype archive of websites of artists based in Berlin.