[Some words addressed to the fourth world Judaica Curators Conference, held on 4th May 2021 under the aegis of the National Library of Israel. My thanks are due to Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at the NLI, for the invitation.]

I’m not sure how generally familiar you are with Web archiving, but this year marks 25 years since the generally accepted beginning of systematic archiving of the Web on a large scale. And so, there is now a substantial literature on the subject, from the practicalities of the process to the growing and remarkably diverse uses to which archived Web materials are now being put by researchers. Some suggested ways into this reading are on the slide. [Links are given at the end of this post.]

What I can most usefully do to set up our discussion today is to raise some initial broad questions as to what a collaborative archiving project for the “Jewish internet” might look like: to, if you like, set up the sheets on the flipchart into which this group may start to add some thoughts.

There are here a set of four basic questions, which are interdependent in several ways. In one sense, the easiest of these is the question of how. Web archiving is a process which tends to cross the departmental divisions in most libraries and archives: it requires curatorial expertise in the selection of material; technical expertise (and also curatorial skills of a particular kind) in managing the harvesting of the materials and maintaining quality; further (and different) technical skills are needed in managing storage, preservation and access; and different skills again in orientating and engaging end users. But within the small but worldwide (and well-integrated) community of people in this space, this set of skills and technologies are well understood and documented. So, though I’ve listed this question first, it is (I suggest) the one that needs answering last.

The question also arises of which institutions should be involved, and how any collaborative project should be configured. Several models are possible:
(i) first of these might be a situation where several institutions agree to parcel out sections of the Jewish internet, and each works largely independently to archive that material in line with their existing collection remits and resources;
(ii) second might be a rather tighter model, in which institutions collaborate directly in the selection of material to archive, but delegating the harvesting, description, preservation and access to a single institution. And that institution might be one of the curating institutions, or (alternatively) an outsourcing partner.

To give some examples, in the UK, the responsibility for web archiving under non-print legal deposit is shared between six institutions, one of which (the British Library) deals with much of the process. Also in the UK Web Archive is the Quaker collection, the content of which was selected by a specialist library but collected again by the British Library. Globally, several libraries have collaborated (through the International Internet Preservation Consortium) on collections on the Olympics Games and most recently Covid-19, delivered via the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service. Within either of these models, there is arguably much to be gained from direct engagement with faith communities themselves, both to build consent to archiving, to guide selection, and to bring forward users and advocates for the final archive.

The third basic question relates to the law, particularly surrounding copyright (but not only that). Some nations have legal deposit frameworks in place for non-print materials, including the UK, France and Denmark, although only a small minority of countries have such a thing, and these dispensations are usually accompanied by very significant restrictions on access. Nations vary in how they construe the notion of fair use in such things, and it is within the relatively liberal regime in the US that the Internet Archive is able to work. Various ways of working are available. Firstly, there is the direct approach to site owners for explicit permission to archive, a slow, resource-intensive and only intermittently successful endeavour. Other institutions have operated on a notice-and-takedown basis, where the owner is contacted and the lack of any expressed objection is taken as sufficient basis to continue; others again archive widely and take material down on request.

The right option for any project has to be determined by a weighing of available resources against the general attitude of each institution to risk. And that risk very much depends on what it is that is to be archived, as different kinds of materials have very different risks associated with them. This is why, I suggest, the first question with which this whole discussion needs to begin is the last on my slide: what *exactly* is to be included and excluded; in other words, what exactly *is* the “Jewish internet”?

I’m not about to begin giving specific answers to this question to an expert audience such as this. But I offer this organising schema written as from the perspective of an historian of modern Christianity, with now several years experience both on the archiving side and as a research user of the archived Web. What I set out in this particular article was quite tightly restricted to specifically religious texts, activities and organisations. But right away, further questions arise.

First is the question of how far the “Jewish internet” encompasses the Israeli web, given the (I think) unique relationship between state, ethnicity and religion that the state of Israel represents. What does that particular Venn diagram look like? Secondly, there is the broader question of culture, and the issue of language. The Danish legal deposit framework allows for archiving of content in the Danish language, regardless of subject and of where it was published. This kind of framework clearly makes little sense in a British, Spanish or French context, where the language has long since ceased to be the possession of the country in which it originated; what about material in Hebrew published outside Israel?

Consider, too, how far the net should be spread into areas such as the arts. Would an archive of the “Jewish internet” include material relating to the artist Marc Chagall? If so, should it include only his religious works, or the portraits and street scenes too? Just the works created to public commissions, or also the private works? Just those in Israel, or in other countries too, not least the window in Chichester cathedral on the south coast of England? In the case of Leonard Bernstein, should West Side Story – a fairly “secular” work – be set aside, but the ‘Kaddish’ Symphony included? What about Chichester Psalms, settings of the Hebrew scriptures commmissioned for an Anglican cathedral in England? I don’t have ready answers for these questions, but I hope to have helped to set them up as a useful place to start your deliberations.

Further reading

The SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018, ed. Brügger and Milligan)

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives (Springer, 2021, eds. Gomes/Demidova/Winters/Risse)

Webster, ‘Users, technologies, organisations: towards a cultural history of world Web archiving’, in Brügger (ed.), Web 25 (Peter Lang, 2017). Download the PDF.

Webster, ‘Religion in Web history’ in The SAGE Handbook of Web History. Download the PDF.