Conference Agenda

ROSSIO and Arquivo.pt developed collaborative activities with the goal of connecting web archiving, arts and digital humanities, between 2018 and 2022. How to make Web archives useful and accessible to digital humanities researchers, and by extension to citizens? This challenge was answered in three ways: training, dissemination, and collaborative curation of websites. This presentation aims to describe those collaborative activities and share what we’ve learned from them.

ROSSIO is a Portuguese infrastructure for the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (https://rossio.fcsh.unl.pt/). Its mission is to aggregate, contextualize, enrich and disseminate digital content. It is based at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the NOVA University of Lisbon (FCSH-NOVA) and involves several institutions that provide content. Arquivo.pt's mission (https://arquivo.pt) is to preserve the Portuguese Web and make available contents from the Web since 1996 to everyone, from simple citizens to researchers.

ROSSIO contributed human resources, namely, a web curator, a community manager, a web developer, and researchers who used Arquivo.pt in their work. Arquivo.pt in turn contributed its know-how, created new services (e.g., the SavePageNow) and made available open data sets.

Therefore, we describe the activities carried out in collaboration and their results.

First, regarding training, we refer to face-to-face and online sessions held with ROSSIO partners and their communities. We highlight the initiative "Café with Arquivo.pt" (https://arquivo.pt/cafe) and the webinars held during the pandemic, because they strengthened the connection between Arquivo.pt and distant communities (e.g., in 2021 they had 538 participants and 84% of satisfaction).

Second, the continuous dissemination in the social networks and groups of the ROSSIO partners which helped to make Arquivo.pt better known (e.g., 7.300 new users accessed the service between 2018 and 2021).

Third, researchers from the ROSSIO collaborated in curating websites, which resulted in documentation for studies and online exhibitions (e.g. “Times of illness, times of healing” at the FCSH NOVA; and "art festivals memory" at the Gulbenkian Art Library).

We concluded this presentation by sharing what we learned from participating in ROSSIO, and the challenges that lie ahead for creating a community of practice among art and humanities researchers.

In Croatia, the only institution that archives the web is the National and University Library in Zagreb. The library established the Croatian Web Archive (HAW) and began archiving Croatian web sources in 2004. From then until today, we have developed several approaches to web archiving: selective, .hr crawls, thematic crawls, building local history collections and social media archiving. In order to broaden our collections and raise public awareness as much as possible the Croatian Web Archive is opening up to collaboration with other libraries, as well as all interested citizens.

One of the examples is the Building Local History Web project from 2020. That year, the Croatian Web Archive began collaboration with public libraries for the purpose of archiving web resources related to a specific area or homeland. The contents are related to a specific locality with the aim of presenting and ensuring long-term access to local materials that are available only on the web and complement and popularize the local history collection of the public library.

In addition to collaboration with public libraries, the Croatian Web Archive has connected with the User Service Department of the National and University Library in Zagreb, in order to involve citizens in the creation of thematic collections through citizen science. In that way the thematic collection “Bees, life, people” was created, using the crowdsourcing method, in collaboration with the public library, citizens (high school students) and other library departments.

This presentation will discuss developing a collection policy, collaboration and working process in building local history and citizen science collections.

The lessons learned throughout collaboration with citizens and public libraries are great encouragement to expand the existing scope of archiving as well as involvement of other libraries and citizens in raising awareness of information literacy and the importance of archiving web content.

A summer internship project is an opportunity for the intern to practice in the real world as well as for the host institution to make extra progress on program objectives, while also engaging with the community. Since 2019, Bibliotheca Alexandrina's IT team has been running a summer internship series for undergraduate students of computing, with several of the internship projects having a connection to web archiving.

Throughout this experience, our mentors have been finding the young interns much intrigued by the technology involved in archiving the web. From a computing perspective, aside from serving to preserve a quite significant information medium, web archiving is an activity where a number of sub-domains of computing come together. A software project in web archiving will involve, for instance, management of big data to keep pace with how the web and consequently an archive thereof continues to expand in volume, parallel computing to achieve the capacity for both data harvesting and processing at that level of scale, machine learning to find answers to questions about the datasets that can be extracted from a web archive, or network theory and graph analytics to come to more understandable representations of the heavily interlinked data.

In this presentation, we invite you to join us on a virtual visit to the home of the IT team at Bibliotheca Alexandrina for a look into our archive of past internship projects in web archiving. These projects include the investigation of alternative graph analytics backends for the implementation of new features in web archive graph visualization, repurposing of the WARC format for use in the library's digital book portal, and crawling the web for text for language model training. For each project, we will review the specific objective, how the problem was addressed, and the outcome. Finaly, to reflect on the overall experience, we will share lessons learned as well as discuss how the interaction with the community through internships is additionally an opportunity to raise awareness about web archiving, the technology involved, and the work of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).