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.
All of the above tools and interfaces help support the exploration and search of web archives for individual users and researchers. In addition, ArchiveWeb aims at supporting the collaborative exploration of web archives. Previous research on helping users keep track of their resources includes tools that provide better search and organizational facilities based on metadata time @cite_11 or tagging @cite_5 . Our system provides similar organizational functionalities refined through close collaboration with several learning communities and previous work on the LearnWeb platform @cite_10 , thus gaining advantage from several years of development and user feedback in that context. ArchiveWeb builds on the LearnWeb experience which already supports collaborative sensemaking by allowing users to share and collaboratively work on resources retrieved from various web sources.
@cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_11
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The World Wide Web is becoming a source of information for researchers, who are more aware of the possibilities for collections of Internet content as resources. Some have begun creating archives of web content for social science and humanities research. However, there is a growing gulf between policies shared between global and national institutions creating web archives and the practices of researchers making use of the archives. Each set of stakeholders finds the others’ web archiving contributions less applicable to their own field. Institutions find the contributions of researchers to be too narrow to meet the needs of the institution’s audience, and researchers find the contributions of institutions to be too broad to meet the needs of their research methods. Resources are extended to advance both institutional and researcher tools, but the gulf between the two is persistent. Institutions generally produce web archives that are broad in scope but with limited access and enrichment tools. The design of common access interfaces, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, limit access points to archives to only URL and date. This narrow access limits the ways in which web archives can be valuable for exploring research questions in the humanities and social sciences. Individual scholars, in catering to their own disciplinary and methodological needs, produce web archives that are narrow in scope, and whose access and enrichment tools are personalized to work within the boundaries of the project for which the web archive was built. There is no way to explore a subset of an archive by topic, event, or idea. The current search paradigm in web archiving access tools is built primarily on retrieval, not discovery. We suggest that there is a need for extensible tools to enhance access to and enrichment of web archives to make them more readily reusable and so, more valuable for both institutions and researchers, and that annotation activities can serve as one potential guide for development of such tools to bridge the divide. Web archives are a huge source of information to mine the past. However, tools to explore web archives are still in their infancy, in part due to the reduced knowledge that we have of their users. We contribute to this knowledge by presenting the first search behavior characterization of web archive users. We obtained detailed statistics about the users’ sessions, queries, terms and clicks from the analysis of their search logs. The results show that users did not spend much time and effort searching the past. They prefer short sessions, composed of short queries and few clicks. Full-text search is preferred to URL search, but both are frequently used. There is a strong evidence that users prefer the oldest documents over the newest, but mostly search without any temporal restriction. We discuss all these findings and their implications on the design of future web archives. Archiving is important for scientific data, where it is necessary to record all past versions of a database in order to verify findings based upon a specific version. Much scientific data is held in a hierachical format and has a key structure that provides a canonical identification for each element of the hierarchy. In this article, we exploit these properties to develop an archiving technique that is both efficient in its use of space and preserves the continuity of elements through versions of the database, something that is not provided by traditional minimum-edit-distance diff approaches. The approach also uses timestamps. All versions of the data are merged into one hierarchy where an element appearing in multiple versions is stored only once along with a timestamp. By identifying the semantic continuity of elements and merging them into one data structure, our technique is capable of providing meaningful change descriptions, the archive allows us to easily answer certain temporal queries such as retrieval of any specific version from the archive and finding the history of an element. This is in contrast with approaches that store a sequence of deltas where such operations may require undoing a large number of changes or significant reasoning with the deltas. A suite of experiments also demonstrates that our archive does not incur any significant space overhead when contrasted with diff approaches. Another useful property of our approach is that we use XML format to represent hierarchical data and the resulting archive is also in XML. Hence, XML tools can be directly applied on our archive. In particular, we apply an XML compressor on our archive, and our experiments show that our compressed archive outperforms compressed diff-based repositories in space efficiency. We also show how we can extend our archiving tool to an external memory archiver for higher scalability and describe various index structures that can further improve the efficiency of some temporal queries on our archive. The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocolwise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a signicant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.