Drexel University (Drexel University, College of Computing and Informatics)

Drexel University, in collaboration with Old Dominion University (ODU), will systematically evaluate the current state of archiving of online advertisements. The project team will analyze the need for, and feasibility of, archiving and preserving online advertisements and other types of dynamic elements embedded in web pages. Activities will include building a collection of archived advertisements to discover what is available; analyzing the data gathered to establish a baseline of what has been archived and what is missing; performing a qualitative analysis consisting of surveys and interviews with archivists and scholars; and pulling together the findings and writing a white paper. The primary audience for this work includes web archivists and librarians concerned with providing complete collections for scholars, and the secondary audience includes scholars in the humanities and social sciences studying the historical impact of online advertisements. As subrecipients, ODU will focus on the development of the initial data sets and devote faculty time to the analysis and publication of each of the project tasks.