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The significance of the web and the crucial role of web archives in its preservation highlight the necessity of understanding how users, both human and robot, access web archive content, and how best to satisfy this disparate needs of both types of users. To identify robots and humans in web archives and analyze their respective access patterns, we used the Internet Archive's (IA) Wayback Machine access logs from 2012, 2015, and 2019, as well as Arquivo.pt's (Portuguese Web Archive) access logs from 2019. We identified user sessions in the access logs and classified those sessions as human or robot based on their browsing behavior. To better understand how users navigate through the web archives, we evaluated these sessions to discover user access patterns. Based on the two archives and between the three years of IA access logs (2012 vs. 2015 vs. 2019), we present a comparison of detected robots vs. humans and their user access patterns and temporal preferences. The total number of robots detected in IA 2012 (91% of requests) and IA 2015 (88% of requests) is greater than in IA 2019 (70% of requests). Robots account for 98% of requests in Arquivo.pt (2019). We found that the robots are almost entirely limited to "Dip" and "Skim" access patterns in IA 2012 and 2015, but exhibit all the patterns and their combinations in IA 2019. Both humans and robots show a preference for web pages archived in the near past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Municipalities, as the front lines of service delivery, use websites as one of the tools to communicate information to the public. While it is considered a record, many organisations, including municipalities, do not manage websites as such. This study aims to explore the archiving of websites as records in the municipalities of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province in South Africa by using the web archiving life cycle model. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a mixed-methods research with an explanatory design, with quantitative data collected first through content analysis of websites and qualitative data collected through interviews. Researchers used multilevel sampling, first quantitatively analysing all available websites of the municipalities (52) in KZN, and then qualitatively selecting only records managers, information managers, web administrators, communication managers and website managers or designers from municipalities because of their understanding and involvement with websites in some way. Findings: This study established that some records on municipal websites are often in paper format in record-keeping systems, whereas others are born digital and are not captured in the systems. Municipalities lack a dedicated web online harvesting tool as well as an archiving policy or strategy to guide website archiving. Furthermore, municipalities placed a high reliance on service providers to keep their websites operational. Research limitations/implications: It became clear during the interviews that most of the participants were unfamiliar with web archiving. As a result, only 12 of the 56 selected participants from the municipalities provided the required information in relation to the current study as others could not provide answers. Data for other participants were not analysed. Originality/value: Due to a lack of infrastructure for ingesting digital records into archival custody, a framework for harvesting web content of value is proposed both internally in municipalities and externally to an archive repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians and researchers rely on web archives to preserve social media content that no longer exists on the live web. However, what we see on the live web and how it is replayed in the archive are not always the same. In this study, we document and analyze the problems in archiving Twitter after Twitter switched to a new user interface (UI) in June 2020. Most web archives could not archive the new UI, resulting in archived Twitter pages displaying Twitter's "Something went wrong" error. The challenges in archiving the new UI forced web archives to continue using the old UI. But, features such as Twitter labels were a part of the new UI; hence, web archives archiving Twitter's old UI would be missing these labels. To analyze the potential loss of information in web archival data due to this change, we used the personal Twitter account of the 45th President of the USA, @realDonaldTrump, which was suspended by Twitter on January 8, 2021. Trump's account was heavily labeled by Twitter for spreading misinformation; however, we discovered that there is no evidence in web archives to prove that some of his tweets ever had a label assigned to them. We also studied the possibility of temporal violations in archived versions of the new UI, which may result in the replay of pages that never existed on the live web. We also discovered that when some tweets with embedded media are replayed, portions of the rewritten t.co URL, meant to be hidden from the end-user, are partially exposed in the replayed page. Our goal is to educate researchers who may use web archives and caution them when drawing conclusions based on archived Twitter pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the shifting landscape of sharing knowledge, it is no longer only about writing papers. After a paper is written, what comes next is an integral part of the process. This special issue delves into the transformative landscape of scholarly communication, exploring novel methodologies and technologies reshaping how scholarly content is generated, recommended, explored and analysed. Indeed, the contemporary perspective on scholarly publication recognizes the centrality of post-publication activities. The criticality of refining and scrutinizing manuscripts has gained prominence, surpassing the act of dissemination. The emphasis has shifted from publication to ensuring visibility and comprehension of the conveyed content. The papers compiled in this special issue scrutinize these evolving dynamics. They delve into the intricacies of post-processing and close examination of manuscripts, acknowledging the impact of these aspects. The overarching objective is to stimulate scholarly discussions on the evolving nature of communication in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of the Web, the International Museum of Women emerged with the mission to highlight the achievements of women throughout history. Headquartered in San Francisco, the museum experimented with the rise of new digital technologies and evolved into a virtual museum with global outreach. Through innovative online approaches, they actively engaged communities around the world and gathered perspectives from a wide spectrum of visitors, whose voices were included in the exhibition narratives. In order to safeguard the museum's legacy and its groundbreaking digital exhibitions, The Feminist Institute in New York launched a digital preservation initiative, working closely with the Global Fund for Women, a non-profit foundation that merged with the International Museum of Women in 2014. On July 31, 2023, we conducted an interview with Marie Williams Chant, Director of Archives and Special Projects, to delve into the museum's historical significance. We also discussed their archival strategies and procedures, along with its potential impact on the museum's legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article details the efforts of the online resource known as the Internet Archive to preserve Internet news web sites as well as digitizing and archiving physical newspaper collections from around the world.

Purpose: Researching the current state and prospects of the digital transformation of libraries in Ukraine is relevant to understanding and addressing the challenges that libraries face amidst the rapid development of technologies and changes in ways of perceiving and disseminating information. Design/Methodology/Approach: For this study, the sample was drawn from the population of public libraries in Ukraine (11338 in total). The sample included libraries selected by random sampling. A structured questionnaire was designed to collect information about the availability of computers and Internet connections in Ukrainian libraries. The questionnaire was distributed electronically and by mail to library representatives. Descriptive statistics, including percentages, were calculated to summarise the prevalence of computers and Internet access in Ukrainian libraries. Findings: The findings revealed that the low level of computerisation poses a barrier to the implementation of modern technologies and access to digital resources. Furthermore, financial difficulties hinder the ability to invest in digital initiatives and innovative projects. Research Limitation/Implications: This study includes issues related to the digitalisation of Ukrainian libraries and can be applied to the digitalisation of libraries as a whole. Social Implication: The digital transformation of Ukrainian libraries has profound social implications that extend beyond the realm of information access and technological advancement. This democratization of information promotes lifelong learning, promotes research efforts, and promotes informed decision-making by citizens. Practical Implication: In this context, it is necessary to digitally transform libraries to ensure effective access to information and meet the needs of users in the digital environment. Originality/ Value: The study focuses on the social consequences of digital transformation increasing the availability of information and reducing the digital divide, which makes it important for understanding the modern challenges of Ukrainian libraries and their impact on society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When replaying an archived web page, or memento, the fundamental expectation is that the page should be viewable and function exactly as it did at the archival time. However, this expectation requires web archives upon replay to modify the page and its embedded resources so that all resources and links reference the archive rather than the original server. Although these modifications necessarily change the state of the representation, it is understood that without them the replay of mementos from the archive would not be possible. The process of replaying mementos and the modifications made to the representations by web archives varies between archives. Because of this, there is no standard terminology for describing the replay and needed modifications. In this article, we propose terminology for describing the existing styles of replay and the modifications made on the part of web archives to mementos to facilitate replay. Because of issues discovered with server-side only modifications, we propose a general framework for the auto-generation of client-side rewriting libraries. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of using a generated client-side rewriting library to augment the existing replay systems of web archives by crawling mementos replayed from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine with and without the generated client-side rewriter. By using the generated client-side rewriter, we were able to decrease the cumulative number of requests blocked by the content security policy of the Wayback Machine for 577 mementos by 87.5% and increased the cumulative number of requests made by 32.8%. We were also able to replay mementos that were previously not replayable from the Internet Archive. Many of the client-side rewriting ideas described in this work have been implemented into Wombat, a client-side URL rewriting system that is used by the Webrecorder, Pywb, and Wayback Machine playback systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at highlighting how interest in the issues of web and social media archiving and preservation has grown enormously, in parallel with the awareness of the importance of these ‘resources’ as privileged sources for reconstructing the history of our era. How will the historians of the future be able to reconstruct the historical period we are living through if memory institutions are not able to archive and preserve the websites and social media of institutions, public bodies, parties, associations, government bodies, political figures, and famous people in general, given that everything is now conveyed through these channels? The fragility of the web, then, would require immediate action and the launch of ‘web and social media archiving’ initiatives without delay, on pain of the disappearance of all that has been made available online in recent years, but on this point the situation in Italy - with a few exceptions - appears to lag far behind other European countries and enormously behind the Anglo-Saxon countries. There is therefore an urgent need to launch initiatives to raise awareness on these issues and to train the skills and professionalism required to conduct web and social media archiving and preservation projects.

This dataset contains information about 22,915 banner advertisement images appearing on Chinese- and English-language web pages in the late 1990s and early 2000s archived on the Wayback Machine. For each ad image, the dataset provides information about the image’s format and size, archived URLs of the image file, archived web pages the image appeared in, and, if available, web pages the image was linked to. The dataset also provides text data obtained from the images using optical character recognition (OCR). This dataset is useful for researchers in visual culture, history, media studies, and business and marketing.

The abrupt closing of the web hosting service GeoCities – one of the most popular websites inhabited by users in the 90s – is a well-known example of the importance of web archiving for saving digital cultural heritage. GeoCities’ shutdown is a warning for today’s social media user-generated content that might suffer the same fate. Various web archiving organisations archived and nowadays present GeoCities pages. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied engage with GeoCities’ legacy in their project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2010–ongoing). This paper expands on the archival strategies of the artists and places their practice in the context of web archiving organisations – specifically Archive Team, the Internet Archive, and Restorativland – to understand how an artistic position may open up other ways of engaging with digital cultural heritage. This paper considers the archival practices of the organisations, artists, and users as a network of care, enabling different forms of remembrance. Whereas the archiving organisations preserve and present GeoCities statically, Lialina and Espenschied take a performative archival approach, in which they re-perform the dataset with old and new users. Through circulation and narration, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age builds on the memories of the artists and users and aims to give the GeoCities heritage back to users. The project invites users to interpret and make meaning of GeoCities and embraces the fluidity of digital culture, whilst embodying the future archival insecurity of commercial platforms.

Awareness of the need to preserve the Web heritage began to spread in the early 1990s, and the first Web archiving initiatives were launched at the National Library of Australia in 1993-1996. However, even today, especially in Italy, it is difficult to find contributions that address the topic of Web and Social media archiving from the perspective of process governance and its relationship with the laws and ethical issues. The purpose of this article is to investigate which actors are involved in these processes, what are the main criticalities or innovations compared to "traditional" cultural heritage management, providing concrete examples where possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will look at the recent Hachette decision against the Internet Archive, analyzing how the court's reliance on past authorities with insufficient context distorted their meanings. It will focus only on the controlled digital lending (CDL) aspect, not discussing the other claims in the suit or exploring the specific implementation of CDL by the Internet Archive (IA). Since CDL programs can vary widely, IA is better situated than others to identify missing context related to the analysis of the unique components of their efforts. And other libraries engaging in CDL should be able to easily see where their programs differ from the judge's description of IA's. For that reason, the analysis below only delves into the language that might be used to chill all CDL programs or innovation more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abrupt closing of the web hosting service GeoCities - one of the most popular websites inhabited by users in the 90s - is a well-known example of the importance of web archiving for saving digital cultural heritage. GeoCities' shutdown is a warning for today's social media user-generated content that might suffer the same fate. Various web archiving organisations archived and nowadays present GeoCities pages. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied engage with GeoCities' legacy in their project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2010-ongoing). This paper expands on the archival strategies of the artists and places their practice in the context of web archiving organisations - specifically Archive Team, the Internet Archive, and Restorativland - to understand how an artistic position may open up other ways of engaging with digital cultural heritage. This paper considers the archival practices of the organisations, artists, and users as a network of care, enabling different forms of remembrance. Whereas the archiving organisations preserve and present GeoCities statically, Lialina and Espenschied take a performative archival approach, in which they re-perform the dataset with old and new users. Through circulation and narration, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age builds on the memories of the artists and users and aims to give the GeoCities heritage back to users. The project invites users to interpret and make meaning of GeoCities and embraces the fluidity of digital cultur e, whilst embodying the future archival insecurity of commercial platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awareness of the need to preserve the Web heritage began to spread in the early 1990s, and the first Web archiving initiatives were launched at the National Library of Australia in 1993-1996. However, even today, especially in Italy, it is difficult to find contributions that address the topic of Web and Social media archiving from the perspective of process governance and its relationship with the laws and ethical issues. The purpose of this article is to investigate which actors are involved in these processes, what are the main criticalities or innovations compared to “traditional” cultural heritage management, providing concrete examples where possible.

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The purpose of the paper was to highlight the digitization of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in institutional repositories in South Africa with a view to develop a framework for Web archiving IKS-related websites in South Africa. Anchored on the interpretivist paradigm, the qualitative research method was adopted for this research. The multiple case study research strategy was considered appropriate for the study. Data was gathered through face-to-face in-depth interviews and content analysis. Interviews were conducted with eight IKS staff at the IKS Documentation Centres across four provinces in South Africa. The study revealed that although there are efforts to digitize IKS and make them accessible through some channels online, there are no specific digital preservation policies guiding the project. Apart from the fact that there are policies in place to support any Web archiving initiative, the concept of Web archiving was generally unfamiliar to the respondents. The respondents admitting to the lack of a standard policy guiding the digitization project also admitted to a lack of knowledge or in-depth understanding of Web archiving and its prospect as a digital preservation measure. The research, therefore, proposes a Web archiving framework that should be incorporated in the digital preservation policy framework. This research will be useful to policymakers and all stakeholders in South Africa and other parts of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ley de Administración de Documentos Públicos de Puerto Rico establishes the importance of preserving public records due to their historic, legal, administrative, or informative value. Social media content created by government entities and elected leaders is increasingly a part of everyday life; however, there is no strategy in place to collect and preserve it. These ephemeral platforms are being used for messaging that range from the innocuous to the consequential, such as when, in August 2019, Governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares announced his resignation through Facebook. The lack of a formal retention policy threatens Puerto Rico's documentary heritage and transparency efforts. This article argues that as public records are created and disseminated online, Puerto Rico's records management practices must account for it. The study provides archival recommendations and illustrates how the lack of policy for this material affects Puerto Ricans' right to information and imperils its collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foreign experience of forming the majority of national web archives (in national libraries) and many accessible local history archives of public and university libraries has been analyzed due to the development of a model and methodology for electronic local history archives for Russian libraries.It is shown that the global activity on preserving network content is divided into national and regional segments and is national and local history in both contents. Its goals and structure fully fit into the classical forms and directions of national/local history bibliography, which turns out to be the key in all processes of selection and bibliographic processing of a new class of sources. For selection, all the criteria of connection with the country/region/territory, the place of production of the resource, its national language and content, characteristic of the national/local history bibliography; the selection itself is carried out by library specialists. The analysis has revealed the reasons why the preparation of the archived online content for use, regardless of the capabilities of automated technologies, in practice also requires the involvement of specialist in bibliography, the use of classical tools and methods of bibliographic description and indexing of content. The issue of choosing objects for archiving (sites, subdirectories, individual documents) is specially considered. The special significance, advantages and problems of treating individual documents are shown. The necessity of forming such web archiving strategies is substantiated, in which “starting points” are separate documents, and sites are evaluated and selected for productivity as their “containers”. Taking into account the global trends and the conditions of Russian libraries, a model of web archiving is proposed, the implementation of which, in the absence of a national repository and modern tools, will allow the beginning of accumulating some necessary experience and valuable network content.

The article is a written version of the section on general web archiving problems complementing the presentation of Ádám Perger at the 2021 conference “404 Not Found – Who preserves the Internet?”, in which the authors present typical problems they have encountered frequently during the five years of operation of the Web Archive of the National Széchényi Library. Some of these can be solved by the parametrisation the archiving tool or using alternative technology, while others require the involvement of the content provider. The aim of the paper is to raise awareness on how to make websites robotand archive-friendly, similar to the way optimisation is done for accessibility. The article is based partly on the experiences of the Web Archive of the Nation al Széchényi Library and the MIA Wiki knowledge base, and partly on examples collected in the course material for the accredited course of the Library Institute entitled “Internet archiving as a public library task”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive scale of online news calls for collaborative approaches to assessing what has already been archived and asserting which un-archived sites should be preserved, considering their significance in representing a “first draft of history.” And given the fast pace at which online news content evolves, memory institutions interested in preserving this content may need to understand not just what has been archived, but also the temporal and structural conditions that were applied in its archiving. Researchers and journalists likewise have an interest in understanding what online news content is available to them, and are well-positioned to make recommendations about which content should be preserved, why, and at what pace, so that it can be made available into the future. There is therefore a potential for highly productive synergies between the news archiving community and the Cobweb initiative, which is building a collaborative collection development platform supporting the creation of comprehensive web archives by coordinating the independent activities of the web archiving community.   The demands of archiving the web in comprehensive breadth or thematic depth easily exceed the capacity of any single institution, and the same could be said of online news content. To ensure that the limited resources of a given archival program are deployed most effectively, it is important that its curators know something about the collection development priorities and holdings of other, similarly engaged institutions. Cobweb, https://github.com/CobwebOrg/cobweb, will meet this need by supporting three key functions of collaborative collection development of web archives: nominating, claiming, and holdings. The nomination function will let curators and stakeholders (including researchers and journalists) suggest web sites pertinent to specific thematic areas and provide seed-level descriptive metadata; the claiming function will allow archival programs to indicate an intention to capture some subset of nominated sites; and the holdings function will allow programs to document captured sites along with their collection-level description, structural and temporal scope, preservation policies, and terms of use. The aggregated  descriptions of websites archived by many distributed archival programs that will be made discoverable through Cobweb are also intended to make it easier for researchers and journalists to find versions of websites relevant to their work.   Cobweb is a collaborative project of the California Digital Library, Harvard University, and UCLA, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. This presentation provides an update on recent project activities, which include finalizing data models and functional requirements, user experience/interface design, development of a prototype interface and database, and exploring interactions of the Cobweb system with other web archiving systems.

After more than a decade of usage, social media have become a virtual environment where meaningful content is created and kept, highlighting its potential to become part of personal digital archives. This study investigates users' attitudes and preservation practices related to digital memories created on social media. Survey findings highlighted how users seem to consider these items as meaningful digital traces to document important events of their lives, and a potential inherent part of their personal archives. However, results show how this attitude does not seem to be supported by adequate preservation strategies. After analysing social media platforms' policies in relation to users' preservation practices, we advocate for raising more awareness among both users and service providers regarding the risks posed by the ephemerality of the digital world and the need for specific provisions that go beyond the short-term retention of data and look to the future and potential use of what appears to be considered an inherent part of individuals' personal archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Die Auswahl archivwürdiger Websites für kuratierte Webarchivsammlungen ist ein ressourcenintensiver Prozess. Methoden der Digital Humanities, insbesondere der Text- und Linkanalyse, können gewinnbringend zur Unterstützung der Bestandsentwicklung in der selektiven Webarchivierung angewendet werden. In diesem Beitrag wird ein im Rahmen eines DFG-Projekts entwickeltes und an der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek prototypisch umgesetztes Verfahren vorgestellt. Die Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen des Einsatzes computergestützter Methoden beim Bestandsausbau in der Webarchivierung werden bewertet. Selecting websites for archiving is very resource intensive. Methods from the digital humanities, especially computational text and link analysis, can support the selection process. This paper presents an approach that was developed and implemented prototypically at the Bavarian State Library in the context of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It discusses opportunities and challenges of using computational methods for collection development in web archiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is the published version of a presentation at the online conference and workshop “404 Not Found – Who preserves the Internet?” on 23-24. November 2021. It describes the co-operation initiative between the Web Archive of the National Széchényi Library (NSZL) and some main county libraries, and briefly outlines its process and content elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the WARCnet project that is focusing on the use of web archives for research purposes. It takes an overview about the project structure, major tasks, meetings and publications about institutional web archiving practices related to COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital preservation is often framed as a technical problem. While there certainly are technological challenges in digital preservation there are other significant issues as well. These include intellectual property related factors as well as economic concerns. In this paper we look into some of these challenges and consider how they impact digital preservation—especially as it relates to software preservation and web archiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]