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Web archiving


Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated capture due to the massive size and amount of information on the Web. The largest web archiving organization based on a bulk crawling approach is the Internet Archive which strives to maintain an archive of the entire Web. The International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW), begun in 2001, has provided a platform to share experiences and exchange ideas. The later founding of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), in 2003, has greatly facilitated international collaboration in developing standards and open source tools for the creation of web archives. These developments, and the growing portion of human culture created and recorded on the web, combine to make it inevitable that more and more libraries and archives will have to face the challenges of web archiving. National libraries, national archives and various consortia of organizations are also involved in archiving culturally important Web content. Commercial web archiving software and services are also available to organizations who need to archive their own web content for corporate heritage, regulatory, or legal purposes.

Early practice of web archiving involved the highlighting of a “site of the week award” as a record for the contest. Besides that, another early practice was the professional link list (for example Amnesty International’s list of human rights groups) and (Yahoo!) directory and Open Directory Project.

In the mid-1990s, one of the more important listing sites of its kind continually updated an index of worthwhile website destinations organized by content category.

In 1998, Yahoo directory was considered to have made a significant contribution to newfangled online library science, not only by its classification scheme but also by the means of the content “navigation” it developed.

Soliciting, evaluating, and categorizing websites - the large-scale collecting, hand-sorting, and display of websites - could be considered an original form of website analysis. The rise of the algorithmic search engine has largely led to the disappearance of such manual methods.


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