According to the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), "Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web, preserving the collections in an archival format, and then serving the archives for access and use." California State University, Fullerton uses web archiving to capture, preserve and provide access to web-based content related to our institutional history, faculty research, and student projects.
With grant funding from the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) and in partnership with UCLA and Harvard University, the California Digital Library CDL is developing cobWeb, "an open-source platform to support collaborative collection development for web archives. cobWeb’s core functionality supports digital curators in establishing projects to collect thematically organized web archives, allows for submission of nominations to those projects, tracks claims made by collecting organizations to participate by archiving nominated web resources, and reports on holdings that have been archived."
The Internet Archive (which includes both the free Wayback Machine and the subscription-based Archive-IT) archives over one billion (!) pages every week. Learn more about this fascinating non-profit corporation at the heart of archiving the public web.