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Web Archive Collections at the Center for Jewish History

 Collection
Identifier: CJH CA-2

Scope and Content Note

This web archive contains the websites of the Center for Jewish History; its partner institutions: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and other organizations that occupy office space at CJH. Websites include event listings, calendars, online exhibitions, news and press releases, videos and audio from events, blogs highlighting collections at the partner institutions, digital publications, research guides, encyclopedias, conference materials and other information documenting the organizations. The majority of the websites are captured on a quarterly basis, but frequency of crawl is determined by how often the website updates.

Due to technical limitations captures of website are occasionally incomplete. The web collection documents the publicly available content of the web page and does not archive material that is password protected. Linked pages are often not captured. Due to technical or privacy issues, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. This can include missing video or image files, the website could display as an index, or a number of different display issues.

Dates

  • Creation: 2016 April-ongoing

Language of Materials

The collection is in English, with some German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Eastern European languages.

Access Restrictions

The collection is open to all researchers.

To access the archived websites, click on the "Archived Website/Collection" link in the Scope and Content note of the described website/collection. This link will take the user to the Wayback Machine landing page for the seed URL/group. From there, clicking on the dated link will take the user to the crawl of the website from that date.

Use Restrictions

This material may be used for personal, research and educational purposes only. Any other use without prior authorization is prohibited. Please contact the Center for Jewish History at inquiries@cjh.org for further information.

Historical Note

The Center for Jewish History (CJH) provides a collaborative home for five partner organizations: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, founded in 2000. As the organizations increasingly produce materials digitally on their websites without an analog equivalent, it became important for CJH to archive its website and that of its partners. In 2016, the staff at CJH began capturing the websites of the Center and its partner organizations using the Internet Archive's Archive-It software to document the ephemeral activities of CJH and its partner institutions.

Extent

1.4 Terabytes (14,402,400 documents)

Abstract

The Center for Jewish History has, in close collaboration with Internet Archive, captured the websites, content, and peripheral web-based applications of websites chosen by the Center for Jewish History and its five partner organizations to better fulfill their collecting missions.

Arrangement

The collection is arranged alphabetically by organization, then alphabetically by seed URL.

Acquisition Information

In 2016, 28 URLs were designated for capture by CJH archivists.

Processing Information

To create the current online resource, the partners' websites were first crawled on March 2016 using Internet Archive's tool Archive-It (https://archive-it.org/) and, then, periodically crawled again every quarter. The Internet Archive uses a crawler called Heritrix, to index websites that reflect what the website looked like at the time of capture. The following seeds were crawled: http://16thstreet.tumblr.com/, http://archivalleaders.cjh.org/, http://sephardi.house/, http://www.ajhs.org/, http://www.cjh.org/, http://www.lbi.org/, http://www.yivo.org/, http://www.yumuseum.org/. Constraints on crawls were placed to avoid capturing duplicative information, as well as avoiding crawler traps, i.e. parts of websites that create an infinite number of URLs, such as calendars and rss feeds.

After March 2016, crawling was expanded to additional websites created by the Center, its partner institutions, and other organizations that occupy space at CJH.

After capture, CJH archivists assess archived websites for completeness and perform patch crawls or change the scoping methods to get a more accurate version of website at the time of capture.

Genre / Form

Geographic

Title
Guide to the Web Archive Collections at the Center for Jewish History 2016 April-ongoing
Status
Completed
Author
By Nicole Greenhouse
Date
©2015
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin
Language of description note
Description is in English.

Repository Details

Part of the Center for Jewish History Repository

Contact:
15 West 16th Street
New York NY 10011 United States