Web Archive Collections Research Articles

Managing and accessing web archives: Irish practitioners' perspectives.

This article provides practitioners’ perspectives on preservation of the Irish web space by the National Library of Ireland (the NLI). The context of this work is outlined including the history of Ireland’s national library, its role, resources and place in library, archive, cultural and digital preservation networks. The development of the NLI Web Archive is discussed within the wider context of the Library’s mission and digital collecting and preservation policies, as well as international approaches to preserving the web. The article looks at how the NLI has developed its selective web archive over the past decade, and has grown the content and access to it as a way to mitigate against the absence of at-scale solutions. The unusual legal context in Ireland regarding legislative barriers to archiving the Irish web space at scale and the NLI’s work for over a decade to change this situation are discussed as are the significant implications of the current legal situation for data loss and long-term access to Ireland’s contemporary record. Distinctive Irish aspects of digital cultural heritage preserved in the NLI Web Archive collections are highlighted. The opportunities and challenges in developing outreach and access for the Web Archive are considered together with its relationship with the collecting activities of the Library’s Born Digital Pilot Projects. This article will also discuss types of usage and user groups in relation to archived Irish web data. Potential for creative and imaginative uses of Irish web archive collections and data are also considered in relation to the Library’s broader public learning and outreach programmes.

Hypercane

In the Dark and Stormy Archives (DSA) project, we focus on storytelling techniques to summarize collections of archived web pages. Since collections can have hundreds or even thousands of seeds (initial URLs) and each seed can be recrawled many times, with each version separately maintained, techniques that include information about all members of the collection can be overwhelming. The premise of storytelling is to focus on sampling exemplar pages from the collection, and present them in a social media interface familiar to users. We present Hypercane , the tool in the DSA suite responsible for selecting exemplar pages. Hypercane offers eight action statements that can be combined in various ways to customize the sample that is produced. Because of its modular design, Hypercane can also be used to analyze large web archive collections outside of the DSA suite.

Disrupting the library: Digital scholarship and Big Data at the National Library of Scotland

With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and collectors, libraries face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data.

Accessing Web Archives: Integrating an Archive-It Collection into EBSCO Discovery Service

Effective collaboration between archives and technical services can increase the discoverability of special collection materials. Archivists at the University of Dayton Libraries began using Archive-It to capture websites relevant to their collecting policies in 2015. However, the collections were only made available to users from the University of Dayton page on the Archive-It website. Content was isolated in a separate platform and was not promoted to users. Working together, the team of archivists and technical services librarians incorporated the web archive collections into the Libraries’ EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) discovery layer. A local data dictionary was created based on OCLC’s Descriptive Metadata for Web Archiving report (2018), and metadata was added at the seed and collection levels. The result was indexed content on a single, user-friendly platform. The web archive collections were then marketed to the University of Dayton community, and statistics were generated on their use.

Capturing commemoration: the 1916 Easter Rising web archive project

ABSTRACTThis paper outlines a collaborative project between three UK Legal Deposit Libraries, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and the British Library, to create a web archive collection of material relating to the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. From a curatorial perspective, it discusses the potential of themed web archive collections for researching commemorative events, outlines the evolving understanding of archival material, reviews the project, and explores the technical, legal, and methodological problems and opportunities that emerged as the project progressed. It highlights the challenges that arose from collaborating across multiple jurisdictions with differing arrangements surrounding non-print legal deposit, and the impact of institutional and legislative frameworks on collection building.

ArchiveWeb: collaboratively extending and exploring web archive collections—How would you like to work with your collections?

Curated web archive collections contain focused digital content which is collected by archiving organizations, groups, and individuals to provide a representative sample covering specific topics and events to preserve them for future exploration and analysis. In this paper, we discuss how to best support collaborative construction and exploration of these collections through the ArchiveWeb system. ArchiveWeb has been developed using an iterative evaluation-driven design-based research approach, with considerable user feedback at all stages. The first part of this paper describes the important insights we gained from our initial requirements engineering phase during the first year of the project and the main functionalities of the current ArchiveWeb system for searching, constructing, exploring, and discussing web archive collections. The second part summarizes the feedback we received on this version from archiving organizations and libraries, as well as our corresponding plans for improving and extending the system for the next release.

Preserving born-digital catalogues raisonnés: Web archiving at the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)

There has been a dramatic shift in publication of scholarly art research materials from print to digital formats. In late 2013, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) was awarded a two-year grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address challenges of preservation and continued access for future researchers of these materials by implementing a web archiving programme. Due to the transition of many catalogues raisonnés to online from print, born-digital catalogues raisonnés are one of the five key collecting areas of focus for NYARC’s project. The intention of this article is to provide an introduction to the key components of the implementation of NYARC’s web archiving programme, to explore the far-flung implications of the digital shift, and to demonstrate the need for a community of collaboration in building curated web archive collections to benefit the future art historian.