ArchiveWeb: Collaboratively Extending and Exploring Web Archive Collections

TL;DR

ArchiveWeb is a system designed to facilitate collaborative construction, exploration, and discussion of web archive collections, incorporating user feedback to improve functionalities for researchers and archivists.

Contribution

The paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of ArchiveWeb, a novel system supporting collaborative web archive collection management and exploration.

Findings

Positive user feedback from archiving organizations

Effective support for searching and discussing collections

Identified areas for system improvement

Abstract

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.

Full text

1 Introduction

The web reflects a considerable part of our society and is becoming an important corpus for studying human society by researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences alike. Web archives collect, preserve, and provide ongoing access to ephemeral web pages and hence encode important traces of human thought, activity, and history. Curated web archive collections contain focused digital content from specific organizations, related to specific topics or covering specific events, which are collected to provide representative samples and preserve them for future exploration and analysis. However, there have been only a few concerted efforts to provide tools and platforms for exploring and working with such web archives.

Within the ALEXANDRIA project111http://alexandria-project.eu/ we aim to develop models, tools and techniques not only to archive and index relevant parts of the web, but also to retrieve and explore this information in a meaningful way. This paper focuses on the ArchiveWeb platform which supports searching, collecting, exploring and discussing web archive collections such as the ones provided through the web archiving service of the Internet Archive, Archive-It222http://archive-it.org/.

Archive-It provides a subscription web archiving service that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. Currently the Archive-It system is mainly used by librarians and curators in order to build their collections. Less support is given to users and domain experts who actually want to work with the collections, or to the general public. ArchiveWeb333http://archiveweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/aw/index.jsf aims to provide facilities to collaboratively explore and work with web collections in an interactive and user friendly way, both for research and for learning.

In summer 2015 we carried out a preliminary analysis of user requirements during which we interviewed representatives of the Internet Archive as well as experts working in seven archiving organizations and libraries active in web archiving. In most cases the motivation for starting the archiving of digital collections had been to preserve institutional or government websites, or collecting and preserving research outputs (for example faculty members hosting their funded projects on external websites including assets related to the project such as documents and research datasets). Several institutions also curate special collections received as donations of materials from individuals or organizations. Traditionally these materials were paper manuscripts, but they increasingly include digital and multimedia materials as well as social media and web presence.

All respondents confirmed that the current efforts at their institutions are mainly carried out by individual curators or subject specialists who are responsible for individual collections and archiving requests. In some cases there is a collection development executive (CDE) group, as part of the library organization, that coordinates collection building and development. Collaboration is an important aspect in order to avoid duplicating resources and efforts, one of the challenges being “figuring out how to not duplicate efforts that are going on elsewhere, but also how to still build things that are useful”. Some curators are trying to find ways of collaborating both in terms of collecting and displaying information, sharing metadata and schema creation, user folksonomies and tagging, to make the collections come together and be more alive. Easy annotation of resources in collections is a feature that many experts would be happy to explore.

On the basis of this preliminary study, and building on previous work we did for collaborative learning environments  [1, 10, 11, 12, 19] we designed and built the ArchiveWeb system to support collaborative creation and enrichment of web archive collections, with a focus on user interface and searching/sharing functionalities. We ingested 200 web archive collections from Archive-It, and asked our archiving partners for their input. Evaluation was done based on a task-based evaluation design, and analyzing both quantitative interaction data (query log), as well as qualitative feedback in the form of interviews.

In the following section, we provide a short overview of related work, and in Section 3 we describe some web archive collections we are working with. Section 4 includes both a description of the main functionalities of our system and of our evaluation design, a detailed discussion of the evaluation results, as well as directions for future work.

2 Related Work

Tools for supporting search and exploration in web archives are still limited [4]. Most desired search functionalities in web archives are fulltext search with good ranking, followed by URL search [17]. A recent survey showed that 89% of web archives provide URL search access and 79% give metadata search functionalities [7]. Some existing projects that provide limited support for web archive research are discussed below.

The Wayback Machine444http://archive.org/web/ is a web archive access tool supported by the Internet Archive. It provides the ability to retrieve and access web pages stored in a web archive through URL search. The results for each URL are displayed in a calendar view which displays the number of times the URL was crawled by the Wayback Machine. Archive-It and ArchiveTheNet555http://archivethe.net/ are web archive services provided by the Internet Archive and the Internet Memory Foundation. These services enable focused archiving of web contents by organizations, such as universities or libraries, that otherwise could not manage their own archives. The Memento Project666https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7089 enables the discovery of archived content from across multiple web archives via URL search.

A few researchers have worked on providing new interfaces and visualizations for searching, exploring and discovering insights from web archives. Odijk et. al. [15] present an exploratory search interface to improve accessibility of digital archived collections for humanities scholars, in order to highlight different perspectives across heterogeneous historical collections. The motivation for this work derives from the huge amount of digital material that has become available to study our recent history, including books, newspapers and web pages, all of which provide different perspectives on people, places and events over time. In their paper, the authors connect heterogeneous digital collections through the temporal references found in the documents as well as their textual content, in order to support scholars to detect, visualize and explore materials from different perspectives. Padia et. al. [16] provide an overview of a web archive collection by highlighting the collection’s underlying characteristics using different visualizations of image plots, wordle, bubble charts and timelines. Lin et. al. [9] present an interactive visualization based on topic models for exploring archived content, so that users can get an overview of the collection content. The visualization displays a person-by-topic matrix that shows the association between U.S. senators websites and the derived topics. It also provides drill-down capabilities for users to examine the pages in which a topic is prevalent.

All of the above tools and interfaces help support the exploration and search of web archives for individual users and researchers. In addition, ArchiveWeb aims at supporting the collaborative exploration of web archives. Previous research on helping users keep track of their resources include tools that provide better search and organizational facilities based on metadata/time [5] or tagging [3]. Our system provides similar organizational functionalities refined through several learning communities and previous work, LearnWeb [12], thus gaining advantage from several years of development and user feedback in that context. ArchiveWeb builds on the LearnWeb platform which already supports collaborative sensemaking [6, 18] by allowing users to share and collaboratively work on resources retrieved from various web sources [2, 8, 13, 14].

3 Web Archive Collections

Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. It was first deployed in 2006 and is widely used as a service to collect, catalog, and manage collections of archived web content. Fulltext search is also available, even though effective ranking is still an open issue. All content is hosted and stored at the Internet Archive data centers.

Currently about 200 collections from Archive-It have been integrated into the ArchiveWeb system with full metadata indexing, and can be explored through a visual interface. Main topics covered by the Archive-It collections available through ArchiveWeb are: Human Rights, Contemporary art, Global Events as well as various Web resources related to society, history, culture, science, statistics, and governments of various countries.

3.1 Human Rights

The collection Human Rights Web Archive (HRWA) by Columbia University Libraries is made up of searchable archived copies of websites related to human rights created by various non-governmental organizations, national human rights institutions, tribunals and individuals. The collection was started in 2008 and is still being continued, adding new websites on a regular basis.

Identification of websites for archiving is done by subject specialists with expertise in human rights and different regions of the world at Columbia University Libraries. Public nominations are provided by human rights researchers, advocates, organizations and individuals who are involved in the creation of human rights related websites. Priority is given to websites hosted in countries that do not have any systematic web archiving initiatives in place. Websites of intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations are not included in the collection.

Archive-It services are used to maintain the collection, and the Internet Archive and Columbia University Libraries store copies of the resulting data. The collection includes over 711 websites with more than 50 million searchable documents and over 115 million archived documents with an archived data size of more than 5TB.

The HRWA collection provides a good balance between websites of large and well known human organizations based in North America and Europe, and websites of smaller organizations from other regions. It includes websites from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Transparency International, International Crisis Group, and websites from regions with less web archiving activity and more political/social unrest. It also covers websites and organizations which are at greater risk of disappearing. One example of a website that no longer has a live version but can still be accessed by researchers via the Web archive collection is TibetInfoNet777http://www.tibetinfonet.net/, which monitors the situation in Tibet. This page has been captured between May 2008 and July 2015, the ArchiveWeb screenshot shows the human rights group restricted to “Tibet” related resources, with the TibetInfoNet resource on the right side (Figure 1).

The URL provided in ArchiveWeb below the screenshot on the right side points to the original web site, which is no longer available on the live web, but can be retrieved in its previous version through the Wayback Machine (as described in section 4.3).

3.2 Occupy Movement 2011/12

The collection Occupy Movement 2011/12 by Internet Archive Global Events started in November 2011 with members from the Archive-It team and a large web archiving community collaboratively identifying and capturing websites related to the “Occupy Movement”. The movement started in Autumn 2011 and continued in 2012. The collection includes movement-wide or city specific occupy websites, blogs, social media sites and news articles from alternating or traditional media outlets.

The selection of seeds involved public participation by content curators and individuals, as well as crawling of websites from community generated feeds (commencing on December 2011) with 933 seed URLs selected (e.g. “Occupy Feeds”). In the subsequent years the collection was crawled frequently, capturing about 26 million documents and archiving over 900GB of data.

The Archive-It team is also collecting web content on global events at risk of disappearing such as “Earthquake in Haiti”, “North Africa & Middle East 2011-2013”, “Ukraine Conflict”, “2013 Boston Marathon Bombing” and others.

The collection consists of seeds organized into groups such as blogs, international news sites and articles, other sites and social media. An interesting analysis888https://archive-it.org/blog/post/only-41-of-occupy-movement-urls-accessible-on-live-web/ of the collection was carried out in 2014 to see how much of the seed contents still live on the web. The seeds were categorized into news articles, social media URLs, and “movement sites”. Only 41% of the 582 “movement sites”, 85% of 203 social media URLs and 90% of 163 news articles are still alive on the web. All “movement sites” that were no longer available on the web, were either showing 404 errors or taken down by cyber squatters.

4 ArchiveWeb: Functionalities and Evaluation

ArchiveWeb facilitates collaborative exploration of multiple focused web archive collections. The features provided by the system to support this exploration are: searching across multiple collections in conjunction with the live web, grouping of resources for creating, merging or expanding collections from existing ones and enrichment of resources in existing collections using comments and tags.

In order to collect relevant feedback, we carried out a task-based evaluation of ArchiveWeb involving experts from different university libraries and archiving institutions, including a follow-up qualitative interview.

For the evaluation, we imported some publicly accessible web archive collections from Archive-It into ArchiveWeb in order to test the potential of the system to support collaborative work with such collections. We invited eight experts from university libraries and archiving organizations to evaluate the system. Evaluators were from the following institutions: Columbia University, University of Toronto, Cornell University, Stanford Libraries, National Museum of Women Arts, New York Arts Resources Consortium and the Internet Archive. We asked them to carry out two sets of tasks both individual and collaborative. The individual tasks included creating a sub-collection from an existing collection of their institution, enriching an existing collection with additional relevant resources from the live web and annotating resources with information about why they should be included and how often they should be archived. The collaborative tasks involved selecting ten featured resources from their collections, including them into a joint group shared with all other evaluators, and discussing the reasons why such resources were included. The final task involved creating a new collection about a shared topic among the evaluators, searching for relevant seed URLs for this collection using ArchiveWeb, and agreeing with the rest of the evaluators about which seeds should be included, what should be the archiving frequency and why.

The evaluation period spanned about three weeks, after which we invited the evaluators to give us feedback through a questionnaire and through follow-up interviews to fully understand their experience.

The following sections give an overview over the main insights based on both quantitative analysis of query logs and qualitative feedback from the interviews, along with the description of the system functionalities.

4.1 Searching for Resources in Collections and on the Web

ArchiveWeb provides a keyword based search system that returns results from Archive-It collections as well as from the live web (using the Bing Search API999http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/search). If users search for a keyword (e.g. “human rights”), ArchiveWeb returns a list of results from these sources, indicating whether the resource comes from a specific Archive-It collection or from the live web (Fig. 2b). The results being returned from Archive-It collections are based on a full metadata index for these collections (a fulltext index of all content is planned for the next version). Besides webpages, also images (from Bing, Flickr, Ipernity) and videos (from YouTube, TED, Yovisto, Vimeo) can be searched, but not yet from Archive-It collections. For Archive-It collections each search result provides a pointer to the resource item saved in ArchiveWeb (Fig. 2c) and displays information about when it was captured in Archive-It(Fig. 2d). Live web results are not yet saved in ArchiveWeb and can be copied by the user into a group (Fig. 2e); in this case, the Option window provides details about when/if this page has been indexed by the Internet Archive, using the Wayback CDX server API101010https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server.

Search results can be refined using faceted search filters visible below the search box (Fig. 3). For example, for our evaluation it was important to provide filters to show only the resources in a specific collection (Filter: Group) or that were archived by a specific institution (Filter: Collector).

Feedback The integration of searching across web archive collections as well as the live web provides the ability to suggest additional material that could be archived. This is a new feature not present in existing systems used for curation/creation of web archive collections, and it was much appreciated by the evaluators. The search filters mainly used while searching were “Author”, “Tags”, “Group” and “Service”. These filters were mainly used to understand how the results would change with different important filter options while either searching across Archive-It collections or the live web.

Suggestions we received included: (i) providing a transparent explanation of how the relevance ranking is determined, (ii) providing the total number of captures of a page along with the capturing period in order to determine the popularity of an archived result, (iii) providing as default just search results from Archive-It collections with the option to expand the results to the live web in order to facilitate curators who expect to see only archived resources in the first step.

4.2 Organizing and Extending Resource Collections

ArchiveWeb provides the functionality to organize resources into collections (groups of resources) according to clearly defined and coherent themes/topics. This functionality allows working with existing groups, creating new collections/groups and sub-groups, adding new resources to groups, and moving resources between groups.

A group overview interface allows browsing through existing collections available within ArchiveWeb and the collections that a user has created or joined. Descriptions for every collection provide information about the topic/theme and what kind of resources it contains. For Archive-It collections, the description reports the details available on the public Archive-It interface along with a reference link to the specific collection in the ArchiveWeb platform.

After joining specific groups/collections users have the opportunity to edit metadata of existing resources and to contribute new resources from other existing collections or from the live web. The ArchiveWeb collections, derived directly from their Archive-It counterparts, are “read-only”. Users can browse through the resources of each collection using the advanced visualization and exploration functionalities of ArchiveWeb, but they cannot change the original collection. They can create a copy of the entire “read-only” group, or add individual resources to their own collections by selecting resources individually, as well as merge multiple existing collections into one new collection.

Users can also organize their resources into sub-groups within collections in order to group resources that are related to a similar subtopic. Resources can be uploaded to a collection either from the desktop or by suggesting a URL. Each group has a specific interface that visualizes all thumbnails of the most recent snapshot of each resource when it was added to the group (Fig. 4). Resources that no longer exist on the web, or do not have a redirect available, display a thumbnail with the message “The page is no longer available on the web” (we are currently implementing the functionality to upload an earlier thumbnail of the page taken from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine). The overview interface within a group provides a summary of the activities of various members of the group, including the actions of new added resources, resources which were edited or deleted, and users who have joined/left the group.

Feedback One of the evaluators stated, that “ArchiveWeb increases curatorial functionality over that of Archive-It, e.g.: on-the-fly creation of groups, moving resources between groups and easily annotating resources”. Several of the new functionalities of ArchiveWeb were positively highlighted by the evaluators including (i) the ability to curate new arbitrary collections of seed records from across multiple web archive collections, (ii) the possibility of having resources exist at multiple levels (e.g. personal, group, subfolder), and (iii) the ability to create collaborative collections with colleagues from various institutions.

4.3 Enriching Resource Metadata and Discussing Resources

After a resource is added to an ArchiveWeb collection the resource can be enriched with additional comments and tags (in addition to the metadata already provided). The comments on a resource can be used to discuss as to why this resource has been chosen as a seed for a collection, and to decide upon the crawl frequency and crawl depth. By exchanging comments, collaborators can discuss the relevance of a suggested seed resource for a particular collection. The use of tags helps categorize or label a resource with subjects or topics covered by the resource, making it possible to browse collections by filtering based on certain tags. Users can also edit metadata such as title, description and author fields.

The system allows users to archive a single page or a website (resource) by clicking on the “Archive Now” button which sends a request to the Wayback Machine to archive it. This functionality is similar to the “Save Page Now” feature of the Wayback machine, but it facilitates users to gather captures easily as they work within the system. All the captures from Archive-It as well as the wayback captures added using the “Archive Now” functionality are visualized both as a list and in a timeline view to help users navigate through the different archived versions that are available. Figure 4 shows a timeline view on the bottom right.

Feedback One of the new functionalities that was positively highlighted by the evaluators is the possibility to add schema-agnostic classification and other information using tags. Other appreciated functionalities were (i) the ability to use notes/comments in order to highlight the motivations for collecting and to discuss the capture frequency, highly useful when developing collaborative collections across institutions, (ii) list and timeline visualizations were considered useful to explore individual seed records.

Metadata fields which were generally modified while editing a resource included title and description (as not all of them are automatically filled appropriately while uploading a URL to a group), and the author field which is often missing from the original metadata. An interesting suggestion from one of the evaluators was to add open/customizable metadata fields besides title, description and author as they would be needed if curators from different institutions build collections together. Tagging is helpful but not considered a substitute for using custom field names and corresponding values.

4.4 Future Improvements

The evaluators also provided additional suggestions for functionalities that are missing in the ArchiveWeb system which we plan to incorporate in the next release, for example:

Exporting Resources

• the ability to export resources and metadata from collections for research or usage outside of ArchiveWeb.

Bulk Operations

• the ability to select multiple resources by clicking, searching or filtering, and then adding them to a collection. The system should also support bulk editing of resources within a collection such as collective tagging (e.g. to assign a tag to multiple seed records), as well as tagging similar resources across multiple collections and then allowing the option to group them together into a new collection.

Advanced Search

• the ability to limit the search within certain collections, specific domains or paths, and to search within the title only. We also plan to incorporate fulltext search of Archive-It websites instead of just the metadata, even though not all evaluators realized that this functionality was not provided, as rich metadata descriptions are available for many collections.

5 Conclusion

In this paper we discussed the ArchiveWeb system which supports collaborative exploration of web archive collections. We provided a description of the main features of the system such as (i) searching across multiple collections as well as the live web, (ii) grouping of resources for creating new collections or merging existing ones, as well as (iii) collaborative enrichment of resources using comments and tags.

The system has been developed based on an iterative evaluation-driven design based research approach. Starting from a platform which already supported collaborative search and sharing of web resources, ArchiveWeb was designed to address expert users’ requirements (e.g. librarians and curators in archiving institutions). The resulting ArchiveWeb prototype, fully functional, was evaluated through a task-based evaluation study carried out with the same experts who participated in the preliminary investigation. After the quantitative analysis of the logs and the qualitative feedback from the evaluations, we are now incorporating new features such as exporting resources, bulk editing operations and advanced search which will be available in the next release of the system.

Acknowledgments

We thank Jefferson Bailey from the Internet Archive who provided us with the contacts to his colleagues at university libraries and archiving institutions. We are also grateful to all experts, who participated with enthusiasm in our evaluation, providing valuable feedback and useful suggestions to improve the system. This work was partially funded by the European commission in the context of the ALEXANDRIA project (ERC advanced grant no 339233).