Peter Chan assigned to new role as Web Archivist for Stanford Libraries
Stanford Libraries has been engaged in web archiving for over a decade with an emphasis on collecting the “.stanford.edu” and federal, state and local government domains and has determined that we need to have a more strategic and purposeful initiative. Accordingly Special Collections has reassigned Peter Chan from his former role as Digital Archivist, to this new role as Stanford’s full-time Web Archivist.
Peter will report to the University Archivist, and will work closely with Stanford librarians, archivists, and curators across all library units, including metadata specialists and other technical staff, to identify, collect, remediate, and describe web content for discovery, access and preservation. Stanford is an active participant in the international web archiving community and collaborates closely with other web archiving institutions on the development of tools, technologies, and collaborative collection efforts. Peter will be working with colleagues to advance the library’s web archiving efforts and provide guidance, oversight and support for web archiving across the Humanities, Area Studies, Social Sciences, Sciences, and Engineering collections at Stanford.
Peter has been with the Stanford Libraries since 2007, and became one of the country’s first Digital Archivists through participation in the AIMS (An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship) project. That project was the recipient of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Innovation Award (2012). Peter pioneered the use of AccessData FTK to appraise and process born-digital collections, and also built a workstation to read 8 inch floppy disks.
More recently, Peter served as the Project Manager for the ePADD project, overseeing development of software that supports the appraisal, processing, preservation, discovery, and delivery of historical email archives. The project has won numerous awards, including the same NDSA Innovation Award (2017), and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Software Sustainability Institute Award for Research and Innovation (2018).
Peter is currently an instructor for the Society of American Archivists’ Digital Archives Specialist program, and Co-Chair of the International Videogame Data Network (IVDN). He has traveled extensively to both present and teach on the various aspects of his work at Stanford, including residencies at the Royal Library of Copenhagen in 2015, the Computerspiele Museum in Berlin in 2017, and the New Zealand National Library in 2020, as a Fulbright Specialist.
Peter begins his new assignment with the Stanford Libraries & Special Collections on April 16, 2020.
Josh Schneider
University Archivist
Roberto G. Trujillo
Associate University Librarian
Director of Special Collections
