Weekly web archiving roundup: January 14, 2015

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of January 14, 2015:

• “Tracking Down the Elusive ‘Treasure House for Learning’“, from Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig. How we share information and spread knowledge has changed drastically from when the Smithsonian Institution unveiled its first homepage in May 1995.

• “Case Study: Web Archiving Ends the Screenshot Era for the Seattle Humane Society“, from Smarsh, Inc. Read the case study to learn how the organization simplified a potentially complex problem and now preserves its valuable content with Smarsh Web Archiving.

• “NYARC – Web Archiving Quality Assurance (QA)“, from NYARC. Procedural guide and reference source for issues specific to assuring the quality of specialist art historical resources collected from the web by the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), using the Internet Archive’s software service Archive-It.

• “Announcing a New Partnership: California Digital Library, UC Libraries, and Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service“, by Rosalie Lack.  The CDL and the UC Libraries are partnering with Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service. In the coming year, CDL’s Web Archiving Service (WAS) collections and all core infrastructure activities, i.e., crawling, indexing, search, display, and storage, will be transferred to Archive-It.

Weekly web archiving roundup: January 7, 2015

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of January 7, 2015:

• “From Lycos to Ask Jeeves to Facebook. Tracking the 20 most popular web sites every year since 1996“, from Philip Bump. Washington Post article with graphic showing the 20 most popular websites in December of each year from 1996 to present.

• “50 percent of mobile photographers use the cloud as a hub for backup and storage“, by Jackie Dove. Article about mobile photos and use of cloud storage.

• “Page Not Found: Video Games’ Vanishing History,” by Matt Helgeson. Thanks to the proliferation of blogs, websites, and videos on services like YouTube and Twitch, there is more content on video games being produced than ever before. However, we’re also losing a significant portion of the industry’s history on a daily basis.

Weekly web archiving roundup: December 17, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of December 17, 2014:

• “Playing with the Web Archive Analysis Workshop: A Few Tips for Fellow Tinkerers“, from Ian Milligan. Milligan explores the Web Archive Workshop that lets users extract tons of useful data from WARC files. This post show what is needed to get it up and running and then details some of the potential for data analysis..

• “Information Search in Web Archives“, thesis by Miguel Angelo Leal de Costa.

Weekly web archiving roundup: December 10, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of December 10, 2014:

• “Archives, Access, and the Sounds of New York City: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith“, from Brian Fauteux. Interview includes some interesting web archiving concepts.

• “Exploding ARC Files with Warcbase“, from Ian Milligan. Warcbase is an open-source platform for managing web archives built on Hadoop and HBase.

• “URI agnostic deduplication on content discovered at crawl time“, from Kristinn Sigurðsson . In his last blog post, Kris showed that URI agnostic duplicates accounted for about 5% of all duplicates by volume (bytes) and about 11% by URI count. But this is limited to looking up content digests that had been discovered in a previous crawl.

Weekly web archiving roundup: December 3, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of December 3, 2014:

• “The web archivists are here: AIT14 surveys the state of the practice“, from Karl-Rainer Blumenthal. Recap of Archive-It partners meeting in Montgomery, Alabama.

Weekly web archiving roundup: November 26, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of November 26, 2014:

• “All the News That’s Fit to Archive“, from Michael Neubert. Guest post from Michael Neubert, a Supervisory Digital Projects Specialist at the Library of Congress.

• “Building a Complete Tweet Index“, by Yi Zhuang.  Twitter now indexes every public tweet since 2006.

• “Twitter makes all tweets searchable. Here’s how to delete your embarrassing ones“, by Bryan Cronan.  Since it started in 2006, Twitter has been a place where people cover world events in real time. Millions of users have tweeted hundreds of billions of tweets, but searching through them has been difficult. Twitter has unveiled its new search engine, which indexes every public tweet ever sent.

• “The Nostalgia Nerds Who Rescue Old Games From Oblivion“, by Kate Knibbs.  There’s a good chance somebody out there is working to make sure that version of Pizza Tycoon you were obsessed with in 1994 still exists. And they’re probably breaking the law to do it.

Weekly web archiving roundup: November 19, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of November 19, 2014:

• ““Capture All the URLs: First Steps in Web Archiving” in Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice“, from Alexis Antracoli, Steven Duckworth, Judith Silva, Kristen Yarmey. As higher education embraces new technologies, university activities—including teaching, learning, and research—increasingly take place on university websites, on university-related social media pages, and elsewhere on the open Web. Despite perceptions that “once it’s on the Web, it’s there forever,” this dynamic digital content is highly vulnerable to degradation and loss.

Weekly web archiving roundup: November 12, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of November 12, 2014:

• “Digital History Seminar – Interrogating the archived UK web: Historians and Social Scientists Research Experiences“, from Peter Webster, Richard Deswarte, and Gareth Millwood. The UK Web Archive has partnered with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in the project ‘Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities Project’ (BUDDAH) where a new research interface is being developed to further academic research into web archives. Peter Webster introduces Web Archiving, the BUDDAH project and the new research interface, and Gareth Millward and Richard Deswarte relate their experiences in using the resource to research the history of disabled people and accessibility on the WWW, and Euroscepticism. Seminar includes streaming video as well as slides from the individual speakers.

• “Digital Archive Lets Web Surfers Travel Back in Time“, by Elizabeth Palermo.  In honor of the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web this year, Stanford created a digital archive of its bygone Web pages, some of which were among the earliest pages ever published on the Web.

• “The Internet Archive Has Brought Back 900 Classic Arcade Games That You Can Play For Free“; the Internet Archive has brought back some 900 classic 80’s arcade games.

• “Project brings more than 900 vintage arcade games to Web,” by Lisa Respers France.  The Internet Archive, which is a nonprofit founded to build an Internet library, now has the Internet Arcade, where gamers with a taste for nostalgia can go at it for free.

Weekly web archiving roundup: October 30, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of October 30, 2014:

• “Explore the oldest U.S. website“, from Nicholas Taylor. The website amounts to but five pages of the thousands of historical SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory web pages and related assets from 1991-1999 that we are making accessible.

• “All together now: NYARC and the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship”, from Karl-Rainer Blumenthal.  NDSR blog post introducing a model of collaborative digital preservation among institutional and funding partners working towards NYARC’s effort to archive and manage specialist art historical resources on the web.

• “IIPC General Assembly 2015 Call for Papers“, from IIPC.  The International Internet Preservation Consortium is seeking proposals for presentations and workshops at the next conference and general assembly to be held at Stanford University in California, USA on the 27 and 28 April 2015. The theme is “Innovation, connection and co-operation in web data”.

• “Call to participate: Privacy Issues in Web Harvesting Survey“; Heather Oswald conducting survey on current best practices for web harvesting by archival professionals as they pertain to privacy, for Master’s degree in Archival Studies at Clayton State University.

• “The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool“, from Benjamin Sutton.  How do you capture and preserve the experience of a new media artwork created on Twitter in 2010? How do you re-create the design and feel of Twitter’s interface at that time, and populate that interface with users’ contemporaneous profile photos? These are the types of questions that New York’s digital art nonprofit Rhizome is trying to answer in the development of Colloq, a new conservation tool that will help artists preserve social media projects not only by archiving them, but by replicating the exact look and layout of the sites used, and the interactions with other users.

• “The True Cost of YouTube’s Library of Everything“, by Michael Sugarman.  As a business, YouTube is perhaps the grand archive of the information age, but for as long as we continue to ignore its status as a black market, or more appropriately, a free market system quickly growing out of hand, we ignore the fact that Google desires to exploit its lack of accountability to a much greater extent than hoarding all of the world’s music and film.

• “The race to archive Twitpic before 800 million pictures vanish“, by Pierre Chauvin. Right now, a collective of Internet archivists and programmers is trying to do the impossible: save more than 800 million pictures uploaded to the Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic before they disappear down the memory hole after the company’s scheduled shutdown on October 25.

• “Twitpic Data Will Stay Alive “For Now” Thanks To An Agreement With Twitter“, by Jordan Crook. And in a somewhat happy turn of events, Twitpic has announced that it has reached an agreement with Twitter to keep Twitpic photos and links alive, giving Twitter control over the domain and the full photo archive.

Weekly web archiving roundup: October 23, 2014

Weekly web archiving roundup for the week of October 23, 2014:

• “What is Still on the Web after 10-Years of Archiving?“, from Andy Jackson, UK Web Archive Blog. The UK Web Archive started archiving web content towards the end of 2004. They took a look back at the (almost) ten years that have passed since then to see how much they’ve achieved… Are the URLs archived still available on the live web? Or are they long since gone? If those URLs are still working, is the content the same as it was?

• “A Dynamic New Tool to Preserve the Friendsters of the Future”, from Vindu Goel.  Rhizome, a New York nonprofit group dedicated to supporting and conserving digital art, has developed a prototype of a tool that records the immersive experience of a website or a social network.

• “The Internet Archive’s Map of Book Subjects“, from Mario Klingemann.  This map offers an alternative way to browse the 2,619,833 images contained in the Internet Archive’s book collection. It shows 5500 different subjects which have been algorithmically arranged by their thematic relationships.

• “NLM Launches Web Collecting Initiative to Capture and Preserve Selected Ebola-Related Content“; The National Library of Medicine (NLM), has launched a Web collecting initiative to capture and preserve selected born-digital content documenting the 2014 Ebola outbreak. This initiative is a part of its previously-announced Web content collecting effort, which is guided by the NLM Collection Development Manual and other strategic collecting efforts.

• “Results from the 2013 NDSA U.S. Web Archiving Survey“, from Abbie Grotke.  The National Digital Stewardship Alliance is pleased to release a report of a 2013 survey of Web Archiving institutions (PDF) in the United States.