By Friedel Geeraert, Expert in web archiving at KBR | Royal Library of Belgium
The IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2023 took place in Hilversum in The Netherlands at the beautiful building of Sound and Vision. The warm atmosphere of the web archiving community gathered there more than compensated for the cold rain outside. Over the two day conference, presentations were given about themes such as new initiatives and collections, COVID-19, collaborations, digital scholarship and research, tool development, quality assurance, outreach, inclusive representation, data management, preservation and infrastructure. The different workshops organised during both days provided the opportunity to gain more hands-on experience. The programme was so interesting that it was difficult to choose which track to follow or which workshop to choose.
Photo: Olga Holownia | IIPC
Open Source Investigation and Public Values in the Digital Domain
The two keynote speakers, Eliot Higgins of Belligcat and Marleen Stikker of Waag Futurelab shared their expertise and vision. Higgins provided insight into Bellingcat, the independent group of investigative journalists and their ethical digital investigation into conflicts such as the war in Ukraine to debunk misinformation. Bellingcat also initiates programmes to teach students to think critically about online information and sources, thereby helping them to make better informed decisions and formulate well-founded opinions, which is hopeful in light of the polarisation of society.
Photo: Olga Holownia | IIPC
Stikker explained her alternative history of the internet focusing on the social roots instead of its military origins and the role we can all play into managing the internet as a commons and govern it accordingly. She suggests assessing the foundation by asking critical questions about the underlying assumptions and the organisation of government, guaranteeing human rights and ensuring a regenerative socio-economic model (as opposed to the current extractive model). Above all, she argues for undertaking action by for example moving towards platforms that are not governed by big commercial corporations such as Signal and Mastodon.
Photo: Olga Holownia | IIPC
Thoughts, tips and takeaways
As always, participants came away with their heads filled with ideas and useful information. Armed with numerous pages filled with notes and lists of people I need to contact in the coming months to obtain more information, I returned to KBR in Belgium. I will be using the coming year to further look into ARCH, the Archive Research Compute Hub, developed by the Archives Unleashed Project, the Browsertrix Cloud, developed by the Webrecorder team and SolrWayback, developed by the Danish Royal Library. Providing more descriptive information about web archive collections was another interesting idea that was evoked by the web archiving team of the BnF and by Emily Maemura and Helena Byrne as well in their ‘datasheets for datasets’ concept.
Photo: Jacqueline van der Kort | Beeldstudio KB
Photo: Jacqueline van der Kort | Beeldstudio KB
Other aspects that sparked my interest are preservation practices in the context of web archiving, for example WARC validation presented by the team of the National Archives of the Netherlands, the need for consistent use of data repositories such as Zenodo, Software Heritage and the Internet Archive and the use of the URN PWID to reference web archive sources. Other ideas that arose during the conference were linked to quality assurance and analysis: the use of tools such as Screaming Frog by the team at the UK Government Web Archive, the WAVA tool (Web Visualisation and Analysis), developed by the team behind the Web Curator Tool, and the use of rubrics as demonstrated by the speakers of the Library of Congress. The team behind the End of Term web archive also talked about tools used by CommonCrawl that are promising to create derivative datasets and enriched metadata.
Community coming together
These are only a few examples of the wealth of interesting ideas evoked at this conference but on top of that it was wonderful to catch up with other members of the web archiving community during the breaks. Over cups of coffee, delicious ciabatta and sweet pastries, topics of conversation ranged widely from planned changes to national legislations, evolutions in Twitter collection policies and public tenders on one end of the seriousness spectrum, with the sock affinity of an awfully cute puppy and discussions about the best gifts to give to 6 month old babies on the other end. Many thanks for the organisers of this year’s conference for such a great edition of the IIPC WAC. Needless to say, I’m already looking forward to next year’s edition on April 25-26, 2024 hosted by the BnF.
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[…] The 2023 IIPC Web Archiving Conference Reflections – Royal Library of Belgium web archivist Friedel Geeraert summarizes events at the annual conference of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. […]
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