CRATE: A Simple Model for Self-Describing Web Resources

Authors

Joan A. Smith, Old Dominion UniversityFollow
Michael L. Nelson, Old Dominion UniversityFollow

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2007

Pages

12 pp.

Conference Name

7th International Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Preservation (IWAW '07), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 23, 2007

Abstract

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 meta-data 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-object consisting of undifferentiated metadata and the resource byte stream. We describe the CRATE complex object and compare it with other complex-object models. Our target is the everyday, personal, departmental, or community web site where a long-term preservation strategy does not yet exist.

Comments

This work is licenced under an Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs France 2.0 Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 FR).

Original Publication Citation

Smith, J. A., & Nelson, M. L. (2007). CRATE: A simple model for self-describing web resources. Paper presented at the 7th International Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Preservation (IWAW '07), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 23, 2007.

Repository Citation

Smith, J. A., & Nelson, M. L. (2007). CRATE: A simple model for self-describing web resources. Paper presented at the 7th International Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Preservation (IWAW '07), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 23, 2007.