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"Web archive" redirects here. For web.archive.org, see Wayback Machine. For the Safari file format, see webarchive. For the Sun Microsystems file format, see WAR (Sun file format).

Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public.[1]

Web archiving is in the first instance mainly about web data: securing access to web data, long and medium term storage of web data, and interpretation and annotation of Web data.[2] Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated capture due to the massive size and amount of information on the Web. The largest web archiving organization based on a bulk crawling approach is the Internet Archive which strives to maintain an archive of the entire Web. The International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW), begun in 2001, has provided a platform to share experiences and exchange ideas. The later founding of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), in 2003, has greatly facilitated international collaboration in developing standards and open source tools for the creation of web archives. These developments, and the growing portion of human culture created and recorded on the web, combine to make it inevitable that more and more libraries and archives will have to face the challenges of web archiving. National libraries, national archives and various consortia of organizations are also involved in archiving culturally important Web content. Commercial web archiving software and services are also available to organizations who need to archive their own web content for corporate heritage, regulatory, or legal purposes.

It is precisely the content, stripped of much else, that is archived; to preserve this content, the web archivist usually must ignore or, metaphorically speaking, destroy much of the website. The website is archived without the annotations and other gloss that is written onto it, attaches to it, is embedded in it, or surrounds it.[3]

Provenance and development

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Early practice of web archiving involved the highlighting of a “site of the week award” as a record for the contest. Besides that, another early practice was the professional link list (for example Amnesty International’s list of human rights groups) and (Yahoo!) directory and Open Directory Project.

In the mid-1990s, one of the more important listing sites of its kind continually updated an index of worthwhile website destinations organized by content category.

In 1998, Yahoo directory was considered to have made a significant contribution to newfangled online library science, not only by its classification scheme but also by the means of the content “navigation” it developed.

Soliciting, evaluating, and categorizing websites - the large-scale collecting, hand-sorting, and display of websites - could be considered an original form of website analysis. The rise of the algorithmic search engine has largely led to the disappearance of such manual methods.

Applications and repurposing in social science study

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Information from internet archives have been used as evidence (in various court or patent law-related cases) in instances of intellectual-property or trademark infringement, as well as in practices such as cybersquatting and typosquatting. Web archiving can be used to represent a specific historiography: the single-site history, or what might be called the site biography. One can choose to build up project/event-based dataset or archive entire HTML pages. However, the archived page is different from the one previously archived (in the classic version), which is important for researchers interested in capturing and studying website evolution, as an approach to the study of the website as archived object in a historiographical tradition. To use web crawler to collect vast quantities of textual and intertextual information, the archiving of the web enables us to write web history in terms of a past state of the web, or a portion thereof. Historiography can refer to single-site histories or biography, event-based history, or national history. The process of collection encompasses obtaining and storing representations of identified objects. Having identified a set of objects to be included in an archive, the next process, curation, involves creating the set of rules and procedures necessary to collect the desired objects, and to verify that the collected objects match curatorial objectives. With the archived dataset, longitudinal study of the web content and relational study across websites can be conducted.

Collecting the web

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Web archivists generally archive various types of web content including HTML web pages, style sheets, JavaScript, images, and video. They also archive metadata about the collected resources such as access time, MIME type, and content length. This metadata is useful in establishing authenticity and provenance of the archived collection.

Methods of collection

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See also: List of Web archiving initiatives

Remote harvesting

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The most common web archiving technique uses web crawlers to automate the process of collecting web pages. Web crawlers typically access web pages in the same manner that users with a browser see the Web, and therefore provide a comparatively simple method of remote harvesting web content. Examples of web crawlers used for web archiving include:

There exist various free services which may be used to archive web resources "on-demand", using web crawling techniques. These services include the Wayback Machine and WebCite.

Delivery

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In contrast to web harvesting, where the web material is retrieved from the “outside” by contacting the web server, the material can be delivered from the “inside”, that is directly from the producer. It can take proactive and reactive delivery forms. There exist various free services which may be used to archive web resources "on-demand", using web crawling techniques. These services include the Wayback Machine and WebCite.

Database archiving

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Database archiving refers to methods for archiving the underlying content of database-driven websites. It typically requires the extraction of the database content into a standard schema, often using XML. Once stored in that standard format, the archived content of multiple databases can then be made available using a single access system. This approach is exemplified by the DeepArc and Xinq tools developed by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the National Library of Australia respectively. DeepArc enables the structure of a relational database to be mapped to an XML schema, and the content exported into an XML document. Xinq then allows that content to be delivered online. Although the original layout and behavior of the website cannot be preserved exactly, Xinq does allow the basic querying and retrieval functionality to be replicated.

Transactional archiving

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Transactional archiving is an event-driven approach, which collects the actual transactions which take place between a web server and a web browser. It is primarily used as a means of preserving evidence of the content which was actually viewed on a particular website, on a given date. This may be particularly important for organizations which need to comply with legal or regulatory requirements for disclosing and retaining information.

A transactional archiving system typically operates by intercepting every HTTP request to, and response from, the web server, filtering each response to eliminate duplicate content, and permanently storing the responses as bitstreams.

Snapshot strategies[4]

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The Snapshot intends to take a snapshot of a certain portion of the web at a certain point in time. The selective strategy sets out to archive a limited number of websites that have been selected individually prior to archiving, because they are considered important. The event strategy aims at archiving web activity in relation to an event in the broadest sense of the word, for instance, general elections, sports events, catastrophes, etc.; in other words planned as well as unplanned events.

Difficulties and limitations

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The most direct challenge is technical. It includes web harvesting skills and tools, their time-consuming nature of the task, overwhelming dimensions of the data, and accompanying storage limitations.

General limitations

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Some web servers are configured to return different pages to web archiver requests than they would in response to regular browser requests.[5] This is typically done to fool search engines into directing more user traffic to a website, and is often done to avoid accountability, or to provide enhanced content only to those browsers that can display it.

Not only must web archivists deal with the technical challenges of web archiving, they must also contend with intellectual property laws. Peter Lyman[6] states that "although the Web is popularly regarded as a public domain resource, it is copyrighted; thus, archivists have no legal right to copy the Web". However national libraries in some countries may have a legal right to copy portions of the web under an extension of a legal deposit.

Some private non-profit web archives that are made publicly accessible like WebCite, the Internet Archive or the Internet Memory Foundation allow content owners to hide or remove archived content that they do not want the public to have access to. Other web archives are only accessible from certain locations or have regulated usage. WebCite cites a recent lawsuit against Google's caching, which Google won.[7]

Crawlers difficulties

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Web archives which rely on web crawling as their primary means of collecting the Web are influenced by the difficulties of web crawling:

  • The robots exclusion protocol may request crawlers not access portions of a website. Some web archivists may ignore the request and crawl those portions anyway.
  • Large portions of a web site may be hidden in the Deep Web. For example, the results page behind a web form can lie in the Deep Web if crawlers cannot follow a link to the results page.
  • Crawler traps (e.g., calendars) may cause a crawler to download an infinite number of pages, so crawlers are usually configured to limit the number of dynamic pages they crawl.

However, it is important to note that a native format web archive, i.e., a fully browsable web archive, with working links, media, etc., is only really possible using crawler technology.

The Web is so large that crawling a significant portion of it takes a large amount of technical resources. The Web is changing so fast that portions of a website may change before a crawler has even finished crawling it.

Social Science Application difficulties

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To social scientists, the conceptualization and contextualization of the research project directly affects the customization of the web crawling tool and the locus of control of data collection, which might lead to potential tradeoff between robustness and replicability on the one hand, and dynamism, responsiveness and validity on the other. [8]Of importance here is how a web archive as an object, formed by the archiving process, embeds particular preferences for how it is used, and for the type of research to be performed with it. Because of the nature of the internet data, the analysis and application of web archived data must be verified for accuracy and reliability, also with the consideration of the protection of human subjects.

Aspects of web curation

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Web curation, like any digital curation, entails:

  • Certification of the trustworthiness and integrity of the collection content
  • Collecting verifiable Web assets
  • Providing Web asset search and retrieval
  • Semantic and ontological continuity and comparability of the collection content

Thus, besides the discussion on methods of collecting the Web, those of providing access, certification, and organizing must be included. There are a set of popular tools that addresses these curation steps:

A suite of tools for Web Curation by International Internet Preservation Consortium:

Other open source tools for manipulating web archives:

  • WARC Tools - for creating, reading, parsing and manipulating, WARC archives programmatically
  • Google Search Tools - for indexing and searching full-text and metadata within web archives[citation needed]

Free but not open source tools also exists:

  • WARC Software Development Kit (WSDK) represents a set of simple, compact, and highly optimized Erlang modules to manipulate (create/read/write) the WARC ISO 28500:2009 file format.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Habibzadeh, P.; Sciences, Schattauer GmbH - Publishers for Medicine and Natural (2013-01-01). "Decay of References to Web sites in Articles Published in General Medical Journals: Mainstream vs Small Journals". Applied Clinical Informatics. 4 (4). doi:10.4338/aci-2013-07-ra-0055.
  2. ^ Schneider, Steven; Foot, Kirsten; Wouters, Paul (2009). “Web Archiving as E-Research,” in e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice. Routledge. pp. 205–221.
  3. ^ Rogers, Richard (2013). Digital Methods. MIT Press. pp. 61–82.
  4. ^ Brügger, Niels (2013). Web archiving—Between past, present, and future. In M. Consalvo & C. Ess (Eds.), The Handbook of Internet Studies. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
  5. ^ Habibzadeh, Parham (2015-07-30). "Are current archiving systems reliable enough?". International Urogynecology Journal: 1–1. doi:10.1007/s00192-015-2805-7. ISSN 0937-3462.
  6. ^ Lyman (2002)
  7. ^ FAQ Webcitation.org
  8. ^ Schneider, Steven; Foot, Kirsten; Wouters, Paul (2009). “Web Archiving as E-Research,” in e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice. Routledge. pp. 205–221.
  9. ^ "Web Curator Tool". Webcurator.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
Bibliography
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Category:Collections care Category:Museology Category:Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage Category:Digital preservation Digital Library project Category:2001 introductions

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