Chesapeake Project's Born-Digital Legal Information Archive Report

The Chesapeake Project has issued the first year evaluation (pdf) of the Project's two-year pilot program. From the executive summary:

Archiving Activity and Numbers

• 2,705 digital items were harvested and archived, along with their respective preservation metadata, in the OCLC Digital Archive, representing roughly 1,266 titles.
• Monthly archiving activity levels varied from 71 to 377 items archived per month. The mean number of items archived per month was 225.42 with a standard deviation of 96.53. The median number of items added per month was 221.

Access Statistics

• Items in The Chesapeake Project’s digital archive were accessed total of 5,317 times. Public (non-authenticated) users were responsible for 2,528 instances of access (47%). Libraries participating in The Chesapeake Project accessed their own materials as authenticated users as total of 2,267 times (43%). Authenticated libraries and institutions not participating in the project accessed archived items a total of 533 times (10%).
• Total monthly access figures ranged from a low of 206 instances of access in July 2007 to a high of 979 instances of access in September 2007.

Original URL Inactivity Levels

• Through a sample analysis of the original URLs of titles harvested from the Web and archived through February 29, 2008, it was determined that 8.3 percent of the original URLs had become inactive by March 2008.
• More than 90 percent of the top-level domains in the sample were state (state.[state code].us), organization (.org), and government (.gov) URLs, which represented approximately 41 percent, 32 percent, and 17 percent of the sample, respectively. 10.8 percent of state URLs, 10 percent of government URLs, and 8.3 percent of organization URLs were found to be inactive.
• More than 95 percent of the titles in the sample were in PDF format. Of these, 8.2 percent were found to have inactive original URLs. Four percent of the titles in the sample were in X/HTML formats; these items were found to have a similar inactivity rate of 8.7 percent.

See also the Project's Collection Plan (Sept. 2007)(pdf).

Hat tip to beSpacific. [JH]