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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view.

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Session Overview

Session

WORKSHOP: SOLRWAYBACK [PART 1]

Time:

Monday, 20/Apr/2026:

1:30pm - 3:00pm

Location: ATELIER [+2]

Floor: +2 Next to the KBR Museum Entrance

Presentations

Run your own full-stack SolrWayback, collaborate & unlock the potential of archived data

Thomas Egense¹, Anders Klindt Myrvoll¹, Ben O' Brien², Victor Harbo Johnston³, Jon Carlstedt Tønnessen⁴, László Tóth⁵

¹Royal Danish Library, Denmark; ²The National Library of New Zealand; ³Aarhus University; ⁴National Library of Norway; ⁵National Library of Luxembourg

An updated version of the '21, ‘23 and '24 IIPC WAC workshops “Run your own full stack SolrWayback” with added user cases showing SolrWayback’s growing resilience, robustness and sustainability, how to contribute and an open discussion to conclude the workshop.

Background

SolrWayback is a major search and discovery platform for the archived web with a strong focus on usability (https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback). It provides real time full text search, discovery, statistics extraction & visualisation, data export and playback of webarchive material. SolrWayback uses Solr (https://solr.apache.org/) as the underlying search engine. The index is populated using Web Archive Discovery (https://github.com/netarchivesuite/warc-indexer). The full stack is open source and freely available.
SolrWayback is used by multiple institutions and research environments throughout the web archiving community (map of 29 known users).This workshop aims at making even more people acquainted with the software and its possibilities.

As an open source software project SolrWayback is growing. This can be seen in the diversity of the contributors on Github. Since the last IIPC workshop on SolrWayback in 2024, the software has moved in multiple directions. Some contributions which could be mentioned here are the following: The memento protocol has been implemented for better comparability between archives, a huge rework and upgrade of the frontend framework has been done and playback of old ARC files have been improved.

The workshop consists of:

Introduction to the ecosystem of SolrWayback
Installation, setup and running the SolrWayback bundle
Participants are expected to follow the installation guide and will be helped whenever stuck.
The SolrWayback bundle is the easiest way of getting started with SolrWayback and is a good tool for making participants of the workshop gain hands-on experience with the software on their local computers.
Leave participants with a fully working stack for index, discovery and playback of WARC files
WEB CHILD at Aarhus University - research use at scale: the making of a +30 TB collection/SolrWayback-installation from WARC-files.
WebData Research Infrastructure at the National Library of Norway: Experiences from setting up a test-platform, based on a SolrIndex.

Use-case from the National Library of Luxembourg

From idea to code to implementation - how to contribute / GitHub/ best practise
Open discussion of SolrWayback, configuration, features and ideas

Expected learning outcome

When participants have attended the workshop, they will have a working installation of SolrWayback on their local computers and they will have learned to install and interact with the software. During the workshop participants are also introduced to how SolrWayback can support collaborative work with the archived web as a source for children's history as well as a more technical case on tracking pixels. These specific cases act as examples of research use and through them participants of the workshop will gain an understanding of how SolrWayback can be integrated into their research practices and support their exploration of the archived web. Attendees will also know how to contribute ideas and code through Github and the discussion at the end of the workshop will inspire and leave attendees with thoughts and impulses to act, improve and sustain SolrWayback.

Prerequisites:

Participants should have a Linux, Mac or Windows computer with Java installed. To see if java is installed type this in a terminal: java -version
If you are a Windows user, ensure up-front that you have administrative rights on your computer.
Beforehand participants should download the latest release of the SolrWayback bundle from: https://github.com/netarchivesuite/solrwayback/releases
Having institutional WARC files available is a plus, but sample files can be downloaded from https://archive.org/download/testWARCfiles or https://commoncrawl.org/get-started (The corpus contains raw web page data, metadata extracts, and text extracts.)
A mix of WARC-files from different harvests/years will showcase SolrWaybacks capabilities the best way possible.

Support

During the conference there will be focused support for SolrWayback in a dedicated Slack channel from the facilitators of the workshop.

Target audience

Web archivists and researchers with medium knowledge of web archiving and tools for exploring web archives. Basic technical knowledge of starting a program from the command line is required as this is currently the only way of starting the program. However, the SolrWayback bundle is designed for easy deployment, so terminal interaction will be at a minimum.
Maximum number of participants
20-25 for the installation part. More participants can listen along if wanted

Coordinator(s)/ facilitator(s)

All of the authors, 5, and other attendees that might chime in.