Proceedings of the 7th International Web Archiving Workshop IWAW'07. June 2007.

J.A. Smith and M.L. Nelson.

If not for the Internet Archive’s efforts to store periodic snapshots of the web, many sites would not have any preservation prospects at all. The barrier to entry is too high for everyday web sites, which may have skilled webmasters managing them, but which lack skilled archivists to preserve them. Digital preservation is not easy. One problem is the complexity of preservation models, which have specific metadata and structural requirements. Another problem is the time and effort it takes to properly prepare digital resources for preservation in the chosen model. In this paper, we propose a simple preservation model called a CRATE, a complex ob ject consisting of undifferentiated metadata and the resource byte stream. We describe the CRATE complex object and compare it with other complex-ob ject models. Our target is the everyday, personal, departmental, or community web site where a long-term preservation strategy does not yet exist.

@article{jas:iwaw2007, author = {Michael L. Nelson and Joan A. Smith}, title = {CRATE: A Simple Model for Self-Describing Web Resources}, journal={Proceedings of the 7th International Web Archiving Workshop IWAW'07}, year = {2007}, month = {June} }