Nancy Y. McGovern
Digital Preservation Officer
Cornell University
Virtual Remote Control: Latest Developments on the Risk Management for Web Resources Model

Bio

Nancy Y. McGovern heads the Research Department (http://www.library.cornell.edu/iris/research) within Instruction, Research, and Information Services (IRIS) of Cornell University Library (CUL). The core research areas of the group are digital preservation with a particular focus on Web archiving and digitization, and organizational evaluation and assessment for libraries and archives. She is co-editor of RLG DigiNews with Anne R. Kenney. She is also the Digital Preservation Officer at CUL. She has worked on digital preservation topics since 1986 and is working on her Ph.D. in digital preservation at University College London.

Presentation Abstract

The IRIS Research team at Cornell University Library has been working on a Web archiving project, Virtual Remote Control. This phase of the work concludes in April. We have refined our risk management model and produced a further round of summary results from the research. In addition, we have developed a controlled Web site for testing tools that is at the evaluation stage, and a Web tool evaluation initiative that provides an overview of available Web tools, notes emerging areas, and provides Web-based mechanism and protocol for tracking and evaluating tool development in a range of categories over time. These developments are aimed at populating a proof of concept model as the basis for future work. In the course of this work, we also some lessons learned about dealing with the retention of our own research records, as institutional records, and managing our Web presence as a research group.