Apologies for cross-posting

Alexandria: The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues invites submissions for a themed issue on Web Archives and Collecting Websites.

Websites and social media services have grown quickly as means of expression, and memory institutions including national libraries have been rising to the challenge of preserving these new forms of content and cultural expression. We are seeking articles on implementation models for web archiving, the implications of national legal and policy frameworks, and the value and uses of web archives for scholarly and other research users.

A process of double peer review will be applied. Abstracts are due Friday 13 December 2013 and the full manuscript for selected articles will be due Friday 25 April 2014. The themed issue will be published in Summer 2014.

Abstracts should be no more than 1000 words.

Full articles should be between 4,000 and 7,500 words long.

Short communications should be no more than 3,000 words long.

Author guidelines are available at http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showinfo=ip014

Suggested topics include:

• The legal and political environments and their implications for web archives
• The place and value of web archives within a national library’s collections
• Defining the scope of a national web collection and implementing it in practice
• Collection development goals and strategies for websites
• Harvesting techniques or other approaches to archiving websites
• Partnerships and consortia approaches to web archiving
• Challenges in archiving social media content and streaming media content
• Approaches to quality assurance for web archives
• Preservation strategies for archived web content
• The long-term sustainability of web archives
• Metadata standards, and practices for describing archived websites
• Approaches to enabling discovery and access for web archives
• Technologies and techniques for visualizing and analysing web archives
• The research value and scholarly uses of web archives
• Impacts of web archives for reference librarians and other libraries
• The overall implementation of web archiving within national libraries
• National libraries’ organization models for supporting web archiving
• Lessons learned from implementation practices within a national library
• Benchmarking and lessons learned from other national libraries’ web archives

However, this is not a prescriptive list: Alexandria wishes to present the widest possible range of papers relating to web archives, including papers from the perspective of academic libraries, public libraries and other archiving institutions.

Queries about the suitability of a topic should be addressed to the Editor, Monica Blake ([log in to unmask]), or Assistant Editor, Anne Welsh ([log in to unmask]).