UbuWeb is a collaboratively curated website which includes thousands of historic and contemporary avant-garde texts, sound recordings, moving images and related curatorial and analytic commentary. Founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it has grown to be a vast educational resource, providing online access to an obscure yet vital aspect of the cultural record that would be, in many cases, otherwise lost.
The initial goals of this project were to propose improvements to UbuWeb’s navigation and content access, and to introduce a plan for archiving and preservation. This site describes the unique characteristics of UbuWeb which are relevant to these goals: its existing structure/classification and its legal/financial issues. In light of these characteristics, the digital (and other) preservation options available for pursuing these goals are evaluated. Progress towards the most promising of these, and plans for continuing work are also outlined.
Niels Brügger states: “Since an archived website to a certain degree is only shaped in the archiving, it should be accompanied by a document containing methodical considerations of why and how the website has been archived” (2005). This is just such a document.
Archiving Ubu 