1 Archiving and Preserving the Web Kristine Hanna Internet Archive April 2006

2 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

3 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

4 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

5 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”

6 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?

7 Wayback Machine

8 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

9 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.

10 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

11 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 Archive-It

12 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

13 Archive-It Access All collections are accessible for free to the general public, with text search, at: – org –Partners websites with links Plus, member web application with login

14 Screen shot here Public site

15 Test Drive the Application

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19 Screen shots here Monitor page Reports page XML feed

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

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

23 Archive-It Releases 1.0 (February 8) 1.5 (April 19) 2.0 (July 29)

24 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)crawler.archive.org

25 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