This site collects archives of institutional websites from California College of the Arts. It is a memorial to the college's web presence, most of which will be taken offline when the college closes in June 2027.
How to use the Web Archive
You can search through the archived sites by title, domain, and description. The search does not cover site content. You can also filter sites by how they were archived. Sites were archived using three different means:
- Static HTML - The site was mirrored to static HTML files.
- Internet Archive - The site was archived by the Internet Archive and is available for playback in the Wayback Machine.
- Webrecorder - The site was archived using Webrecorder for dynamic playback.
Static sites can be navigated internally as though they were online. Links to external sites may break. Note that links between archived sites won't work either but you can check this archive to see if we have a copy of the site being linked to.
The Internet Archive, on the other hand, can mostly be navigated as if a site was live. You can follow internal and external links, which will work if an archived copy exists. Note that some media may be missing or unplayable. If you land on a media asset via navigation which the Internet Archive claims isn't available, you can sometimes access it by feeding its URL back into the Wayback Machine as a starting point.
Webrecorder uses a playback system that resembles a browser interface around the site, complete with a navigation bar. There is also a "Browse Contents" drawer which lets you pick from a list of URLs contained in the archive. You can navigate a site internally but if you click a link that is not part of the archive (e.g. links to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram) you receive a "not found" message.
Embedded media on some of the Static HTML sites will only work as long as the externally hosted resources are online. For instance, videos hosted on CCA's Panopto platform will cease functioning when CCA closes and Panopto is shut down. Some sites (e.g. "Make. Act. Resist.") already have broken embeds to videos that were deaccessioned.
Team
- Eric Phetteplace, Systems Librarian. Site design, web archiving, project management.
- Mark Goh, Site Reliability Engineer. Inventory of CCA websites.
- Nancy Chan, Instructional Technologist. Quality assurance and web archiving.
- Tanza Solis, Web Developer. Site design and web archiving.
- Joel Lithgow, Web Developer. Site design and digital archiving.
Technical Details
The cca/cca-web-archives repository on GitHub contains some notes and scripts in the docs folder which were used in this project. We compiled a list of existing CCA sites from a server inventory spreadsheet and DNS records. Our inventory undoubtedly missed some sites, especially official ones run by academic programs or student organizations but not using CCA infrastructure.
Most of the Static HTML sites were mirrored to HTML files using wget then hosted on GitHub Pages. This approach was appropriate for smaller sites which do not rely on APIs or other dynamic content, such as "Make. Act. Resist." and Visual Narratives (Spring 2021). Some of the modern sites like the 2026 Commencement Celebration and After Intelligence already had their code hosted on GitHub and were able to be deployed to GitHub Pages using a custom workflow. These were designed by Joel Lithgow for Marketing & Communications and use the Astro framework.
Many CCA websites, especially our more popular ones, already had coverage in in the Internet Archive. We used the wayback python library and code contained in the "ia" folder of the cca-web-archives project to programmatically investigate the coverage of larger CCA sites. Complete sets of URLs from some web properties, such as the CCA Libraries and the Rewind Review Respond publication, were submitted to the Internet Archive using their Save Page Now for Google Sheets service. CCA also reached out to the Internet Archive for assistance with archiving our entire web presence. The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) graciously agreed to archive our sites. The representation of CCA websites as they existed in 2026 should be fairly complete in the Internet Archive.
Webrecorder was used for smaller dynamic sites that we could manually navigate through in a reasonable amount of time but were unable to be captured successfully with wget, such as BuildLab. We used the Webrecorder Chrome Extension to create the archive and hosted the WACZ file used for playback on GitHub using Git LFS.