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Archiving and Preserving the WebKristine Hanna

Internet Archive

April 2006

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Internet Archive Universal Access to Human Knowledge

• a 501(c)(3) non-profit

• Located in Presidio, San Francisco California

• Founded in 1996 to build an ‘Internet library’

• Provide permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

• Built on open source principles

• Open Source software developed by Internet Archive and the IIPC

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Internet Archive Stats

• Largest public web archive• 60 billion pages, 55 million sites• Have expanded to include texts, audio, moving

images, and software: 2.6 million downloads a day

• 60,000 unique users a day

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What do we collect?Web Archive

• Take a broad snapshot of the web every 2 months • 2 billion pages a month• Websites from every domain (.org, .com, .edu etc)• Content in 21 languages• Entire archive accessible for free to the public via

the website at www.archive.org

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Why try to collect and preserve it all?

• Web has no boundaries, no limits• What will be important to future generations?• What is there today may be gone tomorrow

– “Capture now, ask why later”– “Grab it while you can, work it out later”– “Lose as little as possible”

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Open Source Technology primarily developed by Internet Archive and IIPC

• Heritrix: web crawler• Wayback Machine: access tool for rendering and

viewing files• Nutch and Nutchwax: Search engine• Arc File: archival record format (ISO work item)

How do we collect it?

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Wayback Machine

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Preservation

• Store multiple copies of each Archive

• 1300 machines/servers

• Multiple copies at different geographical locations (U.S. Alexandria, Amsterdam)

• Standard storage boxes, open source design

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Archiving Next Steps

Institutions:• need to create collections around web

material • want to dig deeper in crawls for their

specific websites. • Want more control and access• want a technology partner that could harvest,

index, access, store and preserve their collections for them.

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• In 2002, began to form partnerships with Library of Congress, NARA and other National Libraries, including Australia, France and Italy

– Dedicated Crawl Engineer

- Customized crawling

• Library of Congress collections: (sample)

• Iraq War: 450 Million documents and growing

• 2004: U.S. National Elections: 88 Million documents

• Supreme Court Nomination 2005: 100 Million documents

1. Partner Contract Crawls

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• Last year, early 2005, we had requests from state archivists, university librarians and other memory institutions:– develop an application for smaller institutions, that

have some resource constraints– A web based service that allows partners to create,

manage, search and store their web archives – User friendly web interface– Does not require technical expertise or infrastructure

• Pilot launched in September 2005

2. Archive-It

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Pilot Partners

• Center for Research Libraries• Research Libraries Group ( U of Toronto, U of Indiana,

Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, IISH)• University of Texas• Library of Virginia• State Archives South Dakota• State Archives North Carolina• State Archives Alabama• Minnesota Historical Society• Institut d'Etude Politique de Grenoble

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Archive-It Access

• All collections are accessible for free to the general public, with text search, at:– www.archiveit. org– Partners websites with links

• Plus, member web application with login

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Screen shot here

• Public site

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Test Drive the Application

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Screen shots here

• Monitor page

• Reports page

• XML feed

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• Search– Your archived web pages are searchable by text or

URL

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• Stored Online

• We provide copies of the files in a hard drive that we can ship to your institution up to 2x a year

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Archive-It Releases

• 1.0 (February 8)

• 1.5 (April 19)

• 2.0 (July 29)

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Challenges we face

• Making the collections useful for a variety of end users (i.e. general public, researchers)

• Making sure we capture the best and most relevant content

• Continuing to develop our tools for access and harvesting (crawler.archive.org)

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Internet Archive’s priorities

• Collaboration and Partnerships

– Continue to act as a technology partner in providing web archiving services to government and memory institutions

– Continue to develop Open Source software

– Develop common tools, storage formats and standards through the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium)

– Open Content Alliance (OCA) digital books project

• Multiple copies across the world

– Within IA’s own facilities and with partners such as LC, Bnf, Library of Alexandria