Curated web archive collections contain focused digital contents which are collected by archiving organizations 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. This paper describes the functionalities of our current prototype for searching, constructing, exploring and discussing web archive collections, as well as feedback on this prototype from seven archiving organizations, and our plans for improving the next release of the system.
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 archiving has been gaining interest and recognized importance for modern societies around the world. However, for web archivists it is frequently difficult to demonstrate this fact, for instance, to funders. This study provides an updated and global overview of web archiving. The obtained results showed that the number of web archiving initiatives significantly grew after 2003 and they are concentrated on developed countries. We statistically analyzed metrics, such as, the volume of archived data, archive file formats or number of people engaged. Web archives all together must process more data than any web search engine. Considering the complexity and large amounts of data involved in web archiving, the results showed that the assigned resources are scarce. A Wikipedia page was created to complement the presented work and be collaboratively kept up-to-date by the community.