Archiving Web sites locally

[Kevin W. Bishop]

Our institution is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year and as a
technologically-rich Institute, the idea of archiving (sections of) our Web
site is circulating.  As the Webbed-world continues to move at Web-speed, in
the not too distant future (5 yrs?) I can imagine a rising interest in
reviewing the design and content of current Web sites.

I'm curious to learn of any ideas for and/or possibly actual *efforts* at
locally archiving Web sites.  

I am aware of the Web and Usenet archival and retrieval project called,
respectively, the Internet Archive <http://www.archive.org/> and Alexa
<http://www.alexa.com/>.  Although extremely admirable, this technology seems
like overkill for our purposes.

*Is anyone archiving institutional Web pages in-house to record its
"hyper-heritage," as it were?  
        **Technically speaking, how do you do it?  
                [THIS IS MY BIGGEST QUESTION.]

*What constitutes an archivable iteration or generation of a page or site?

*Is there a frequency by which the archive is updated?  Or does it depend on
updates to the site/page in question?

*How would you address issues of evolving browser versions possibly rendering
these "old" pages vastly different from how they were seen originally?  In
other words, should the pages be associated with currently endorsed - and
consequently archived - browsers as well?  

Any and all comments are welcome.
Thanks.

-kb

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Kevin W. Bishop                              
Campus-Wide Information System Coordinator
Libraries and Information Services
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute             
110 8th St. Troy, NY, 12180-3590    
(518) 276-8332   Fax  276-8559
bishopk at rpi.edu
http://www.rpi.edu/rpinfo
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