Illustration by Jørgen Stamp digitalbevaring.dk CC BY 2.5 Denmark
Overview
This case study provides a brief novice to intermediate level overview summarised from the DPC Technology Watch Report on Web-Archiving. Three "mini case studies" are included illustrate the different operational contexts, drivers, and solutions that can be implemented. The report itself provides a "deep dive" discussing a wider range of issues and practice in greater depth with extensive further reading and advice (Pennock, 2013). It is recommended to readers who need a more advanced level briefing on the topic and practice.
Introduction
The World Wide Web is a unique information resource of massive scale, used globally. Much of its content will likely have value not just to the current generation but also to future generations. Yet the lasting legacy of the web is at risk, threatened in part by the very speed at which it has become a success. Content is lost at an alarming rate, risking not just our digital cultural memory but also organizational accountability. In recognition of this, a number of cultural heritage and academic institutions, non-profit organizations and private businesses have explored the issues involved and lead or contribute to development of technical solutions for web archiving.
Services and Solutions
Business needs and available resources are fundamental considerations when selecting appropriate web archiving tools and/or services. Other related issues must also be considered: organizations considering web archiving to meet regulatory requirements must, for example, consider associated issues such as authenticity and integrity, recordkeeping and quality assurance. All organizations will need to consider the issue of selection (i.e. which websites to archive), a seemingly straightforward task which is complicated by the complex inter-relationships shared by most websites that make it difficult to set boundaries. Other issues include managing malware, minimizing duplication of resources, temporal coherence of sites and long-term preservation or sustainability of resources. International collaboration is proving to be a game-changer in developing scalable solutions to support long-term preservation and ensure collections remain reliably accessible for future generations.
The web archiving process is not a one-off action. A suite of applications is typically deployed to support different stages of the process, though they may be integrated into a single end-to-end workflow. Much of the software is available as open source, allowing institutions free access to the source code for use and/or modification at no cost.
Integrated Systems for Web-archiving
A small number of integrated systems are available for those with sufficient technical staff to install, maintain and administer a system in-house. These typically offer integrated web archiving functionality across most of the life cycle, from selection and permissions management to crawling, quality assurance, and access. Three are featured here.
PANDAS |
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PANDAS (PANDORA Digital Archiving System) was one of the first available integrated web archiving systems. First implemented by the National Library of Australia (NLA) in 2001, PANDAS is a web application written in Java and Perl that provides a user-friendly interface to manage the web archiving workflow. It supports selection, permissions, scheduling, harvests, quality assurance, archiving, and access. PANDAS is not open source software, though it has been used by other institutions (most notably the UK Web Archiving Consortium from 2004 to 2008). It is used by the NLA for selective web archiving, whilst the Internet Archive supports their annual snapshots of the Australian domain. |
Web Curator Tool (WCT) |
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The Web Curator Tool is an open source workflow tool for managing the selective web archiving process, developed collaboratively by the National Library of New Zealand and the British Library with Oakleigh Consulting. It supports selection, permissions, description, harvests, and quality assurance, with a separate access interface. WCT is written in Java within a flexible architecture and is publicly available for download from SourceForge under an Apache public licence. The WCT website is the hub for the developer community and there are active mailing lists for both users and developers. The highly modular nature of the system minimizes system dependencies. |
NetarchiveSuite |
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NetarchiveSuite is a web archiving application written in Java for managing selective and broad domain web archiving, originally developed in 2004 by the two legal deposit libraries in Denmark (Det Kongelige Bibliotek and Statsbiblioteket). It became open source in 2007 and has received additional development input from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek since 2008. It is freely available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The highly modular nature of the system enables flexible implementation solutions. |
Third party and commercial services
Third party commercial web archiving services are increasingly used by organizations that prefer not to establish and maintain their own web archiving technical infrastructure. The reasons behind this can vary widely. Often it is not simply about the scale of the operation or the perceived complexity, but the business need and focus. Many organizations do not wish to invest in any skills or capital that is not core to their business. Others may use such a service to avoid capital investment. Moreover, organizations are increasingly moving their computing and IT operations into the cloud, or using a SAAS (Software as a Service) provider. Web archiving is no exception. From a legal and compliance perspective, third party services are sometimes preferred as they can provide not just the technology but also the skills and support required to meet business needs. This section introduces some of the third party services currently available but is of course a non-exhaustive list, and inclusion here should not be taken as recommendation.
Archive-It |
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Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service provided by the Internet Archive. Customers use the service to establish specific collections, for example about the London 2012 Olympics, government websites, human rights, and course reading lists. A dedicated user interface is provided for customers to select and manage seeds, set the scope of a crawl and crawl frequency, monitor crawl progress and perform quality assurance, add metadata and create landing pages for their collections. Collections are made public by default via the Archive-It website, with private collections requiring special arrangement. The access interface supports both URL and full text searching. Over 200 partners use the service, mostly from the academic or cultural heritage sectors. The cost of the service depends on the requirements of the collecting institution |
Archivethe.Net |
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Archivethe.Net is a web-based web archiving service provided by the Internet Memory Foundation (IMF). It enables customers to manage the entire workflow via a web interface to three main modules: Administration (managing users), Collection (seed and crawl management), and Report (reports and metrics at different levels). The platform is available in both English and French. Alongside full text searching and collection of multimedia content, it also supports an automated redirection service for live sites. Automated QA tools are being developed though IMF can also provide manual quality assurance services, as well as direct collection management for institutions not wishing to use the online tool. Costs are dependent upon the requirements of the collecting institution. Collections can be made private or remain openly accessible, in which case they may be branded as required by the collecting institutions and appear in the IMF collection. The hosting fee in such cases is absorbed by IMF. |
The University of California's Curation Centre (UC3) |
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As part of the California Digital Library, provides a fully hosted Web Archiving Service for selective web archive collections. University of California departments and organizations are charged only for storage. Fees are levied for other groups and consortia, comprising an annual service fee plus storage costs. Collections may be made publicly available or kept private. Around 20 partner organizations have made collections available to date. Full text search is provided and presentation of the collections can be branded as required by collecting institutions. |
Private companies |
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Private companies offer web archiving services particularly tailored to business needs. Hanzo Archives, for example, provide a commercial website archiving service to meet commercial business needs around regulatory compliance, e-discovery and records management. Hanzo Archives emphasize their ability to collect rich media sites and content that may be difficult for a standard crawler to pick up, including dynamic content from Sharepoint, and wikis from private internets, alongside public and private social media channels. (More details about the possibilities afforded by the Hanzo Archives service can be found in the Coca-Cola case study) Similarly, Reed Archives provide a commercial web archiving service for organizational regulatory compliance, litigation protection, eDiscovery and records management. This includes an 'archive-on-demand' toolset for use when browsing the web. In each case, the cost of the service is tailored to the precise requirements of the customer. Other companies and services are also available and readers are encouraged to search online for further options should such a service be of interest. |
Case study 1: The UK Web Archive
The UK Web Archive (UKWA) was established in 2004 by the UK Web Archiving Consortium. It was originally a six-way partnership, led by the British Library in conjunction with the Wellcome Library, Jisc, the National Library of Wales, the National Library of Scotland and The National Archives (UK).
UKWA partners select and nominate websites using the features of the web archiving system hosted on the UK Web Archive infrastructure maintained by the British Library. The British Library works closely with a number of other institutions and individuals to select and nominate websites of interest. Selectively archived websites are revisited at regular intervals so that changes over time are captured.
The technical infrastructure underpinning the UK Web Archive is managed by the British Library. The Archive was originally established with the PANDAS software provided by the National Library of Australia, hosted by an external agency, but in 2008 the archive was moved in-house and migrated into the Web Curator Tool (WCT) system.
A customized version of the Wayback interface developed by the Internet Archive is used as the WCT front end and provides searchable access to all publicly available archived websites. Full text searching is enabled in addition to standard title and URL searches and a subject classification schema. The web archiving team at the library have recently released a number of visualization tools to aid researchers in understanding and finding content in the collection.
Special collections have been established on a broad range of topics. Many are subject based, for example the mental health and the Free Church collections. Others document the online response to a notable event in recent history, such as the UK General Elections, Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee and the London 2012 Olympics.
Many more single sites, not associated with a given special collection, have been archived on the recommendation of subject specialists or members of the public. These are often no longer available on the live web, for example the website of UK Member of Parliament Robin Cook or Antony Gormley's One & Other public art project , acquired from Sky Arts.
Case study 2: The Internet Memory Foundation
The Internet Memory Foundation (IMF) was established in 2004 as a non-profit organization to support web archiving initiatives and develop support for web preservation in Europe. Originally known as the European Archive Foundation, it changed its name in 2010. IMF provides customers with an outsourced fully fledged web archiving solution to manage the web archiving workflow without them having to deal with operational workflow issues.
IMF collaborates closely with Internet Memory Research (IMR) to operate a part of its technical workflows for web archiving. IMR was established in 2011 as a spin off from the IMF. Both IMF and IMR are involved in research projects that support the growth and use of web archives.
IMR provides a customizable web archiving service, Archivethe.Net (AtN). AtN is a shared web-archiving platform with a web-based interface that helps institutions to easily and quickly start collecting websites including dynamic content and rich media. It can be tailored to the needs of clients, and institutions retain full control of their collection policy (ability to select sites, specify depth, gathering frequency, etc.). Quality control services can be provided on request. Most is done manually in order to meet high levels of institutional quality requirements, and IM has a dedicated QA team composed of QA assessors. IM has developed a methodology for visual comparison based on tools used for crawling and accessing data, though they are also working on improving tools and methods to deliver a higher initial crawl quality.
Partner institutions, with openly accessible collections for which the IM provides a web archiving service, include the UK National Archives and the UK Parliament.
Access to publicly available collections is provided via the IM website. IM provides a full text search facility for most of its online collections, in addition to URL-based search. Full text search results can be integrated on a third party website and collections can be branded by owners as necessary.
Following the architecture of the Web Continuity Service by The National Archives (The National Archives, 2010), IM implemented an 'automatic redirection service' to integrate web archives with the live web user experience. When navigating on the web, users are automatically redirected to the web archive if the resource requested is no longer available online. Within the web archive, the user is pointed to the most recent crawled instance of the requested resource. Once the resource is accessed, any link on the page will send the user back to the live version of the site. This service is considered to increase the life of a link, to improve users' experience, online visibility and ranking, and to reduce bounce rates.
Web archiving collections are available for public browsing from the IM website, a combination of both domain and selective collections from its own and from partner institutions.
Case study 3: The Coca-Cola web archive
The Coca-Cola Web Archive was established to capture and preserve corporate Coca-Cola websites and social media. It is part of the Coca-Cola Archive, which contains millions of both physical and digital artefacts, from papers and photographs to adverts, bottles, and promotional goods. Coca-Cola's online presence is vast, including not only several national Coca-Cola websites but also for example, the Coca-Cola Facebook page and Twitter stream, and other Coca-Cola owned brands (500 in all).The first Coca-Cola website was published in 1995.
Since 2009, Coca-Cola has collaborated with Hanzo Archives and now utilizes their commercial web archiving service. Alongside the heritage benefits of the web archive, the service also provides litigation support where part or all of the website may be called upon as evidence in court and regulatory compliance for records management applications.
The Coca-Cola web archive is a special themed web archive that contains all corporate Coca-Cola sites and other specially selected sites associated with Coca-Cola. It is intended to be as comprehensive as possible, with integrity/functionality of captured sites of prime importance. This includes social media and video, whether live-streamed or embedded (including Flash). Artefacts are preserved in their original form wherever possible, a fundamental principle for all objects in the Coca-Cola Archive.
Hanzo Archives' crawls take place quarterly and are supplemented by occasional event-based collection crawls, such as the 125th anniversary of Coca-Cola, celebrated in 2011. Hanzo's web archiving solution is a custom-built application. Web content is collected in its native format by the Hanzo Archives web crawler, which is deployed to the scale necessary for the task in hand.
Quality assurance is carried out with a two-hop systematic sample check of crawl contents that forces use of the upper-level navigation options and focuses on the technical shape of the site.
The Archive is currently accessible only to Coca-Cola employees, on a limited number of machines. Remote access is provided by Hanzo using their own access interface. Proxy-based access ensures that all content is served directly from the archive and that no 'live-site leakage' is encountered. The archive may be made publicly accessible in the future inside The World of Coca-Cola, in Altanta, Georgia, USA.
The Coca-Cola web archive collection contains over six million webpages and over 2TB of data. Prior to their collaboration with Hanzo, early attempts at archiving resulted in incomplete captures so early sites are not as complete as the company would like. The collection also contains information about many national and international events for which Cola-Cola was a sponsor, including the London 2012 Olympics and Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.
Conclusions
Web archiving technology has significantly matured over the past decade, as has our understanding of the issues involved. Consequently we have a broad set of tools and services which enable us to archive and preserve aspects of our online cultural memory and comply with regulatory requirements for capturing and preserving online records. The work is ongoing, for as long as the Internet continues to evolve, web archiving technology must evolve to keep pace.
Alongside technical developments, the knowledge and experience gained through practical deployment and use of web archiving tools has led to a much better understanding of best practices in web archiving, operational strategies for embedding web archiving in an organizational context, business needs and benefits, use cases, and resourcing options. Organizations wishing to embark on a web archiving initiative must be very clear about their business needs before doing so. Business needs should be the fundamental driver behind any web archiving initiative and will significantly influence the detail of a resulting web archiving strategy and selection policy. The fact that commercial services and technologies have emerged is a sign of the maturity of web archiving as a business need, as well as a discipline.
Resources
Pennock, M., 2013. Web-Archiving, DPC Technology Watch Report 13-01 March 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr13-01
This report is intended for those with an interest in, or responsibility for, setting up a web archive. It introduces and discusses the key issues faced by organizations engaged in web archiving initiatives, whether they are contracting out to a third party service provider or managing the process in-house and provides a detailed overview of the main software applications and tools currently available.
ISO, 2012, ISO 28500:2009 Information and Documentation – the WARC file format
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=44717
The WARC (Web ARChive) format is a container format for archived websites, also known as ISO 28500:2009. It is a revision of the Internet Archive's ARC File Format used to store web crawls harvested from the World Wide Web.
ISO, 2013 ISO/TR 14873:2013 Information and Documentation – Statistics and quality issues for web archiving
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=55211
This technical report defines statistics, terms and quality criteria for Web archiving. It considers the needs and practices across a wide range of organisations such as libraries, archives, museums, research centres and heritage foundations.
Meyer E 2010 (a), Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art Report, JISC
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/544/
This report summarizes the state of the art of web archiving in relationship to researchers and research needs focussing primarily on individual researchers and institutions.
Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations
Zittrain, Jonathan and Albert, Kendra and Lessig, Lawrence, Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations (October 1, 2013). Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 13-42. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2329161 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2329161
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2329161 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2329161
This article from the Perma project team documents a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information. It proposes a solution for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.
Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
This large-scale study looked into approximately 600K links extracted from over 3M scholarly papers published between 1997 and 2012. Those were links to so-called web-at-large resources, i.e. not links to other scholarly papers. It found one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten.
The National Archives, 2010.Government Web Archive: Redirection Technical Guidance for Government Departments, version 4.2, The National Archives (UK)
This guidance describes an innovative service that provides URL rewriting and redirection functionality for UK Government web pages by setting up redirection to the UK Government web archive where a requested URL does no longer exists on a departmental web site.
MEMENTO and the Time Travel Service
Memento is a tool which allows users to see a version of a web resource as it existed at a certain point in the past. It is now used in several web archives. The Time Travel service based on Memento checks a range of servers including many web archives and tries to find a web page as it existed around the time of your choice.
Archive-It
Hanzo Archives
Wayback
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/archive-access/files/wayback/
Netarchive Suite
https://sbforge.org/display/NAS/NetarchiveSuite
PANDAS
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pandas.html
UC3 Web Archiving Service
https://cdlib.org/services/uc3/about/
Web Curator Tool
http://webcurator.sourceforge.net/
International Internet Preservation Consortium
The IIPC is a membership organization dedicated to improving the tools, standards and best practices of web archiving while promoting international collaboration and the broad access and use of web archives for research and cultural heritage. There are many valuable resources on the website including excellent short videos such as the example below.
Why Archive the Web?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU32rjTaMFE
A short video published on 18 Oct 2012 introducing the challenges of web-archiving and the IIPC. (2 mins 53 secs).
What is a Web Archive?
This short video explains 'Web Archiving' and why is it important that the UK Legal Deposit libraries support it. It was produced as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded 'Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities' project.(2 mins 31 secs)
What do the UK Web Archive collect?
This video for users explains what they can expect to find and where they might go to access the three collections that the UK Web Archive hold. It was produced as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded 'Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities' project. (2 mins 55 secs)
Further case studies
NDSA Website content case studies
The US National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) examines the value, opportunities and obstacles for selective preservation of the following specific web content types:
Science, Medicine, Mathematics, and Technology forums
December 2013 (3 pages).
Science, Medicine, Mathematics, and Technology blogs
December 2013 (3 pages).
Born‐Digital Community and Hyperlocal News
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/working_groups/documents/NDSA_CaseStudy_CommunityNews.pdf
February 2013 (3 pages).
Citizen Journalism
February 2013 (3 pages).
On the Development of the University of Michigan Web Archives: Archival Principles and Strategies
http://files.archivists.org/pubs/CampusCaseStudies/Case13Final.pdf
Michael Shallcross, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan details the strategies and procedures the University Archives and Records Program (UARP) followed to develop its collection of archived websites, and how it initiated a large-scale website preservation project as part of a broader effort to proactively capture and maintain select electronic records of the University. 2011 (29 pages).
References
Pennock, M., 2013. Web-Archiving, DPC Technology Watch Report 13-01 March 2013. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr13-01
The National Archives, 2010. Government Web Archive: Redirection Technical Guidance for Government Departments, version 4.2, The National Archives (UK). Available: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/redirection-technical-guidance-for-departments-v4.2-web-version.pdf
Comments
I work for the Department of Premier and Cabinet in Victoria, Australia, and wanted to know how old the (excellent) page on Web preservation (http://handbook.dpconline.org/content-specific-preservation/web-archiving) is.
The page is marked '2016', but some content management systems will stamp a page every day: could you please tell me how up to date this content is?
I'd like to reference in a guide I'm drafting on records management, and our local resources seem out of date. Yours might well be the most up to date around, but I just wanted to double check.
thanks
Stefan Carey
Project Coordinator
Whole of Victorian Government, Digital Standards Framework
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