Preservation Effort
There is a sort of fractal complexity to the merger of any two organizations, and when those organizations have both been around for decades with complementary and differing parts, that complexity can be dizzying. During the merger of NFAIS and NISO, there were many details that we knew had to be handled with care, and I am very pleased to say that we’ve successfully handled one of those that we wanted to be most careful with.
After evaluating several options, we worked with Archive-It, a part of the Internet Archive, to responsibly archive and preserve the NFAIS website. If you aren’t familiar with Archive-It, their website describes them as follows:
First deployed in 2006, Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. Through our user friendly web application Archive-It partners can collect, catalog, and manage their collections of archived content with 24/7 access and full text search available for their use as well as their patrons. Content is hosted and stored at the Internet Archive data centers.
The archive of the NFAIS website can be accessed here, and because of the world-class hosting from the Internet Archive, it will remain accessible even long after the site itself is removed. This ensures that important aspects of the history of NFAIS, such as the Miles Conrad Award winners and their presentations/speeches from the NFAIS Annual Conference are now a part of the digital record that is the Internet Archive.
This isn’t to say that we’re moving past the NFAIS name or history. For example, the above-mentioned history of the Miles Conrad Award will be moving over to the NISO website. We will be continuing the tradition of the award as we transition the 61 year history of NFAIS conferences over to the Inaugural NISO Plus Conference, this February 23-25th in Baltimore, Maryland. We will also be maintaining the history of NFAIS as a future-forward convener in the information ecosystem through our NFAIS Foresight track inside the conference. More information about NISO Plus will be found at the conference website, http://niso.plus, and registration is open! Please join us.
NISO would like to extend thanks to the team at Archive-It for their assistance with this effort, and to all of the NISO members who had asked about our plans to preserve this important piece of information history.