As we approach the end of 2022, we would like to thank our members and the general web archiving community for their support and engagement this year. Before we move forward into 2023, and return to an in-person General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference (for the first time since 2019!), we wanted to highlight some of this past year’s activities featured on our blog and to take this opportunity to thank all the contributors.
IIPC Governance
Thank you to the 2022 IIPC Chair, Vice-Chair and Treasurer for serving on the 2022 Executive Board. Thank you also to all the members who participated in the 2022 Steering Committee election. Many thanks to IIPC 2022 Chair Kristinn Sigurðsson for leading us through this past year, and reminding us that IIPC truly is an organization for all seasons.
Funded projects
2022 started off with a wrap-up of a project led by our Tools Development Portfolio and developed by Ilya Kreymer of Webrecorder. The goal of this project was to support migration from OpenWayback (a playback tool used by most of our members) to pywb by creating a Transition Guide.
This year also saw the launch of a new tools project “Browser-based crawling system for all.” Led by four IIPC members (the British Library, National Library of New Zealand, Royal Danish Library, and the University of North Texas), the Webrecorder-developed crawling system based on the Browsertrix Crawler is designed to allow curators to create, manage, and replay high-fidelity web archive crawls through an easy-to-use interface.
“Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving,” builds on research by Travis Reid, PhD student at Old Dominion University (ODU) that looks at applying gaming concepts to the web archiving process. This collaboration between ODU and Los Alamos National Laboratory was supported by the IIPC through our Discretionary Funding Program (DFP).
Here’s a list of blog posts on the 2022 projects related to web archiving tools:
- Migrating to pywb at the National and University Library of Iceland
- Browser-based crawling system for all
- Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving Project: Integrating Gaming, Web Archiving, and Livestreaming
- Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving Project Update: Adding Replay Sessions, Performance Results Summary, and Web Archiving Tournament Option to Web Archiving Livestreams
Collaborative Collections
IIPC also funds collaborative collections, which are curated and supported by volunteers from our community. While our Covid-19 collection continues, three new collections were initiated by the Content Development Working Group (CDG) in 2022. In the winter, Helena Byrne of the British Library encouraged everyone to web archive the Beijing 2022 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games, adding to a decade-long collaborative effort of archiving the Olympics and Paralympics. Archiving the War in Ukraine was our second collaborative collection for 2022. Co-curated by Kees Teszelszky of KB, National Library of the Netherlands, and Vladimir Tybin and Anaïs Crinière-Boizet of the BnF, the National Library of France, it offers a comprehensive international perspective on the war. We closed 2022 with a call for nominations (due 20 January, 2023) for Web Archiving Street Art, co-led by Ricardo Basílio of Arquivo.pt and Miranda Siler of Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.
Thank you to Alex Thurman (Columbia University Libraries) and Nicola Bingham (the British Library) for serving as CDG co-chairs, overseeing all new and ongoing collaborative collections:
- Get Involved in Web Archiving the Winter Games – Beijing 2022
- Steeze (Style & Ease) on the Slopes – Web Archiving Beijing 2022
- Celebrating the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics Web Archive Collection
- Web Archiving the War in Ukraine
- Get Involved in Web Archiving the War in Ukraine 2022
- Get Involved in Web Archiving Street Art
Researching web archives
We also published blog posts related to researching web archives on topics spanning from a toolset for researchers to archiving social media to analysing Covid-19 web archive collections.
Yves Maurer of the National Library of Luxembourg, wrote about CDX-summarize, his toolset aimed at anyone interested in researching web archives that are not fully accessible. It offers a possible solution to provide a useful glimpse of “data that resides in-between the legal challenges of full access on the one hand and a textual description or rough single numbers on the other hand”.
Beatrice Cannelli, PhD candidate at the School of Advanced Study (University of London), summarised the results of an online survey mapping social media archiving initiatives, which is part of her research project “Archiving Social Media: a Comparative Study of the Practices, Obstacles, and Opportunities Related to the Development of Social Media Archives.”
We also published two blog posts by the AWAC2 (Analysing Web Archives of the COVID-19 Crisis) Team of researchers working with the IIPC Covid-19 collaborative collection by using ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), a new interface for web archive analysis created by the Archives Unleashed Project Team and the Internet Archive. AWAC2 is supported by the Archives Unleashed Cohort Program, which facilitates research engagement with web archives and the researchers are members of the WARCnet (Web ARChive studies network researching web domains and events) Working Group 2, focusing on analysing transnational events.
Covid-19 web archived content is also at the core of the Archive of Tomorrow (AoT) project that aims to explore and preserve online information and misinformation about health and the pandemic. Introduced earlier this year by Alice Austin (Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh), AoT will form a ‘Talking about Health’ collection within the UK Web Archive. Cui Cui, PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield and also an AoT web archivist, shared her process of working with the ‘Talking about Health’ collection, using faceted 4D modelling to reconstruct web space in web archives.
Here are the 2022 blog posts on researching web archives:
- Investigate holdings of web archives through summaries: cdx-summarize
- Mapping social media archiving initiatives: state of the art, trends, and future perspectives
- Analysing Web Archives of the COVID-19 Crisis through the IIPC collaborative collection: early findings and further research questions
- Studying Women and the COVID-19 Crisis through the IIPC Coronavirus Collection
- Archive of Tomorrow – Capturing online health (mis)information
- Faceted 4D modelling to reconstruct web space in web archives: a pilot approach to develop a sub-collection in context
Last but not least, we would also like to give a shoutout to the brilliant Web Archiving Team at the Library of Congress who worked with us on the online GA and WAC 2022 and took us down memory lane in Remembering Past Web Archiving Events With Library of Congress Staff.
Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to our blog and helped us promote it through their newsletters and social media posts and, of course, thank you to all our readers around the world. We look forward to showcasing your web archiving activities in the new year!
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