Turning Pure Web Page Storages into Living Web Archives

Abstract

Web content plays an increasingly important role in the knowledge-based society, and the preservation and long-term accessibility of Web history has high value (e.g., for scholarly studies, market analyses, intellectual property disputes, etc.). There is strongly growing interest in its preservation by libraries and archival organizations as well as emerging industrial services. Web content characteristics (high dynamics, volatility, contributor and format variety) make adequate Web archiving a challenge. LiWA will look beyond the pure “freezing” of Web content snapshots for a long time, transforming pure snapshot storage into a “Living” Web Archive. In order to create Living Web Archives, the LiWA project will address R&D challenges in the three areas: Archive Fidelity, Archive coherence and Archive interpretability. The results of the project will be demonstrated within two application scenarios namely “Streaming Archive” and “Social Web Archive”. The Streaming Archive application will showcase the building of an audio-visual Web archive and how audio and video broadcast related web information can be preserved. The Social Web application will demonstrate how web archives can capture the dynamics and the different types of user interaction of the social web.