Web Archiving

The Ilmenau University Archives are the public archive responsible for the Technische Universität Ilmenau and its legal predecessors. According to § 4 of the Archive Regulations, it is legally responsible for the collection, acquisition, evaluation, indexing, storage and utilisation of official documents and official documents of the Ilmenau University of Technology that have been assessed as being of archival value (Regulations on the Preservation and Use of University Archive Material - Archive Regulations - of 08. February 2022, in: Verkündungsbl. der Technischen Universität Ilmenau of 08 February 2022) in conjunction with Section 7 of the Thuringian Archive Act (Thüringisches Archivgesetz - ThürArchivG of 29 June 2018, in: GVBl 2018, 308). Official records are understood to be all data created in the course of fulfilling official duties and on behalf of the university (§ 3 para. 3 Archive Regulations). Thus, the web presence of the TU Ilmenau, which consists of a large number of websites, also falls under the term "records" and web archiving is part of the legal mandate of the University Archives.

From a copyright point of view, web archiving is a complex process. Since the archives of the TU Ilmenau is a public archive that does not pursue commercial purposes but serves research in the scientific and general public interest, it is subject to the provisions of Sections 60f and 60e of the Copyright Act (Copyright Act of 9 September 1965, in: BGBl. I p. 1273, last amended by Article 25 of the Act of 23 June 2021, in: BGBl. I p. 1858). The web presence of the TU Ilmenau is a conglomerate of official information and content with low and high protection requirements in the sense of copyright law. While official information is not subject to copyright protection (§ 5 UrhG), contributions, images, videos, etc. have a work character worthy of protection within the meaning of § 2 UrhG. However, it can be assumed that the rights of use of all information presented on the web pages of the TU Ilmenau and created in the employment relationship have been tacitly transferred to the TU Ilmenau as obligatory works (Section 43 UrhG in conjunction with Section 31 (5) UrhG).

§ Section 60e (1) UrhG allows archives to reproduce copyrighted works in the interest of preservation and usability and to technically modify them for long-term preservation. For making protected works available to the public, copyright law provides a terminal regulation for archives (Section 60e (4) UrhG). Since the Ilmenau University Archives would not be able to fulfil its legal mandate of archiving and making usable official documents of the TU Ilmenau without the implied transfer of the rights of use (not the copyrights!), the unrestricted making accessible of the web presence of the TU Ilmenau is carried out under the assumption that it is the holder of the simple rights of use for the contents presented there.

The Ilmenau University Archives are aware that the procedure of making content publicly available that was already accessible to everyone and the implied transfer of rights of use through the transfer to the archive is not conclusively regulated in legal terms. The legal mandate of the university archive, which acts in the public interest, as well as the articulated interest of university departments in releasing the web archive to the public, has prompted the archive to take this step. Should significant legal concerns arise against this release, the archive will reconsider this step.

Web resources of third parties, i.e. student associations etc., do not fall under this assumption. Here, an explicit and written legal transfer of the rights of use is required. The archiving of the data of the Twitter account and the Facebook account of the TU Ilmenau takes place through the annual takeover of the data archive. This will be made accessible at the archive terminal in the future.

In addition to the web presence of the TU Ilmenau, other network resources have been found to be worthy of archiving and will also be archived once the legal requirements have been met. These include the web presences of the student clubs, other student and cultural associations as well as other institutions that have a close connection to the University of Ilmenau and can be archived in accordance with § 4 para. 9 Archivordnung. The selection criteria were: archival responsibility, topicality, relevance and quality of the information, technical conditions and legal requirements.

Web archiving takes place at different steps. While the Typo3 web pages are generally crawled in their entirety, in the case of integrated web applications, such as Moodle or the telephone directory, the crawl is only carried out at the first level in order to document the presence of these applications. The information, the integrated documents and the look and feel are defined as siginficant properties to be preserved. This also defines the method of web archiving as selective harvesting. The web presence of the TU Ilmenau is saved twice a year, that of the other institutions every two years. In contrast, the Corona web pages within the university's web presence are backed up irregularly at denser intervals.

The metadata required for indexing are collected in the context of the crawl and saved with the crawl. Making it usable will take place in various stages: the web presence of the TU Ilmenau will be made publicly accessible in a web archives after initially being made accessible on the intranet. The TU Ilmenau intranet will continue to be accessible only on the intranet. The Twitter and Facebook channel of the TU Ilmenau will only be accessible at the archive terminal. All other network resources will be made accessible according to legal agreement. The permanent preservation of the files will take place in a digital magazine in the future. Until this is set up, controlled storage will take place on the archive's drives.

Web archiving is managed by the University Archive exclusively using open source tools - with all the advantages and disadvantages.The semi-automatic crawl of the web pages is done with "Heritrix" and the manual backup of the intranet with"PyWB". The net resources are archived in the Web ARChive format, which is suitable for long-term archiving according to ISO 28500. The presentation of the contents is realised by "PyWB" and "SolrWayback".

The web archives currently only contains the backups of the web presences of the Technische Universität Ilmenau. Taking into account different user interests, there are three entry points on the archive's homepage:

1. the start page of the domain "tu-ilmenau.de": here you will find the web presence of the TU Ilmenau from 2019-2022.

2. the Corona information: Here the central pages are archived, on which the handling of the university with the Corona virus was regulated. These pages were often backed up after significant changes to the content in 2020-2023.

3. the web journal of the TU Ilmenau "UniOnline" for the years 2021-2022. This entry exists alongside the offer of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, whose web backup (https://d-nb.info/1259520676) can only be viewed in the reading room of the DNB.

4. once the legal requirements are met, further domains will be added to the web archive in accordance with our concept.

In the course of your research, you will probably come across pages that contain error messages indicating that the page is not archived or that are displayed incorrectly. Some pages you will not find at all. Why is this the case?

The web archives currently only contains content that falls under the archival responsibility of the University Archives and for which there is a legal basis for archiving and making available. For example, websites that are outside the domain "tu-ilmenau.de" are generally not archived for reasons of responsibility and legal restrictions. As a rule, you will find a reference to this with the option of jumping to the live version of the link leading outside.

In accordance with the archiving concept, web pages leading to special web applications, such as the library catalogue or Moodle, have also only been archived up to the first level in order to document the existence of this web application. Other web presences that were not found to be worthy of archiving were not considered in the archiving process.

Furthermore, archiving was also not carried out if individual web pages had third-party content protected by copyright, such as press articles or videos.

Under certain circumstances, the website was not accessible on the server side during the backup and was not recorded for this reason. If this error was not registered in the subsequent check and the affected page was subsequently backed up, this error was also passed on.