Presentation Type
Presentation
Date
2025-11-20
Description
In 2024, the Internet Archive (IA) experienced a DDoS attack and subsequent outage that disrupted access to its materials. The University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Health Sciences and Human Services Library (HSHSL) was directly affected, as our institutional repository/digital collections platform, the UMB Digital Archive, relies on Internet Archive URLs for many of its digitized historical collections. Due to storage constraints, these collections were linked through IA URIs rather than hosted directly in the repository. Past digitization contracts with the Internet Archive provided only URIs to the scans, and HSHSL never received local copies, leaving us without any access to over 1800 digitized historical collections materials during this 2024 outage. Recognizing the risk of future outages, HSHSL launched a 2025 project to systematically download and preserve all prior contracted scanning done by the Internet Archive. These files are now being stored locally to ensure long-term stability and accessibility. This presentation will outline our workflow for identifying, retrieving, and organizing files, as well as the challenges we encountered and the solutions we developed. By sharing our experience, we aim to provide a practical example of how libraries can strengthen digital backups, reduce reliance on external platforms, and maintain access to their collections.
Keywords
MIRL Symposium, 2025 MIRL Symposium, presentation
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2025 The Author.
Repository Citation
Weirich, Sarah; Wink, Tara; and Lubinski, Amy, "Outage as Opportunity: Local Backups for Long-Term Access" (2025). Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium. 5.
https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/mirl/2025/program/5
Outage as Opportunity: Local Backups for Long-Term Access
In 2024, the Internet Archive (IA) experienced a DDoS attack and subsequent outage that disrupted access to its materials. The University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Health Sciences and Human Services Library (HSHSL) was directly affected, as our institutional repository/digital collections platform, the UMB Digital Archive, relies on Internet Archive URLs for many of its digitized historical collections. Due to storage constraints, these collections were linked through IA URIs rather than hosted directly in the repository. Past digitization contracts with the Internet Archive provided only URIs to the scans, and HSHSL never received local copies, leaving us without any access to over 1800 digitized historical collections materials during this 2024 outage. Recognizing the risk of future outages, HSHSL launched a 2025 project to systematically download and preserve all prior contracted scanning done by the Internet Archive. These files are now being stored locally to ensure long-term stability and accessibility. This presentation will outline our workflow for identifying, retrieving, and organizing files, as well as the challenges we encountered and the solutions we developed. By sharing our experience, we aim to provide a practical example of how libraries can strengthen digital backups, reduce reliance on external platforms, and maintain access to their collections.