Second, there is very little coverage of Web archiving, which is clearly by far the largest and most important digital preservation initiative both for current and future readers. The Internet Archive rates only two mentions, in the middle of a list of activities and in a footnote. This is despite the fact that archive.org is currently the 211th most visited site in the US (272nd globally) with over 5.5M registered users, adding over 500 per day, and serving nearly 4M unique IPs per day. For comparison, the Library of Congress currently ranks 1439th in the US (5441st globally). The Internet Archive's Web collection alone probably dwarfs all other digital preservation efforts combined both in size and in usage. Not to mention their vast collections of software, digitized books, audio, video and TV news..
Rieger writes:
There is a lack of understanding about how archived websites are
discovered, used, and referenced. “Researchers prefer to cite the
original live-web as it is easier and shorter,” pointed out one of the
experts. “There is limited awareness of the existence of web archives
and lack of community consensus on how to treat them in scholarly work.
The problems are not about technology any more, it is about usability,
awareness, and scholarly practices.” The interviewee referred to a
recent CRL study based on an analysis of referrals to archived content
from papers that concluded that the citations were mainly to articles
about web archiving projects.
It is surprising that the report doesn't point out that the responsibility for educating scholars in the use of resources lies with the "experts and thought leaders" from institutions such as the University of California, Michigan State, Cornell, MIT, NYU and Virginia Tech. That these "experts and thought leaders" don't consider the Internet Archive to be a resource worth mentioning might have something to do with the fact that their scholars don't know that they should be using it.
A report whose first major section, entitled "What's Working Well",
totally fails to acknowledge the single most important digital
preservation effort of the last two decades clearly lacks credibility