Web Archive for California Water Research
The Water Resources Center Archives (WRCA), using the California Digital Library’s Web Archiving Service, has built the California Water Districts Web Archive, a comprehensive archive of water district websites. This Web archive is now available to the general public at: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/CAWaterDistricts
Beginning in November 2009, WRCA (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/WRCA/) began capturing the web sites of nearly 300 water and irrigation district sites critical for research on California water issues. Water districts utilize their websites to publish all types of information, including annual reports, data, press releases, agendas, minutes, events, reports and statistics. This material is especially volatile as the California water infrastructure and market changes or as time sensitive issues are no longer on agendas or in the news. This information while not distributed in print still holds immense social and research value. Researchers can browse the archive by site name, search the archived content by keyword or URL, and even target searches to a particular site or to a document type (such as PDF for substantial reports).
The Web Archiving Service (WAS) enables researchers, librarians and archivists to capture, study and preserve Web content, and to produce public Web archives such as this. WAS is available to research units and individual researchers both within and beyond the University of California. WAS is a service of the University of California Curation Center (UC3), which provides tools and support for the management, curation, and preservation of the information resources underpinning scholarly activities. UC3 works closely with WRCA staff to ensure the long-term viability and usability of water-related materials that support the instructional and research programs of the University of California and the needs of the people of the State.
If you have questions about the California Water Districts Web Archive, contact Paul Atwood at the Water Resources Center Archives: patwood@library.berkeley.edu
To learn more about the Web Archiving Service, visit the WAS Information (http://webarchives.cdlib.org/p/projects) page or contact washelp@ucop.edu.