The internet can be an ephemeral place, which is problematic for digital web archives designed to permanently preserve the content of web pages. Such archives are themselves at risk of losing information, according to an analysis of library and public records web pages.
This is because some of these pages alter their fixed location on the internet, known as a base uniform resource identifier (URI), and there is no automated way to find the new URI. This could be due to organisational changes, lack of policies to safeguard against this type of loss, or simply a mistake.
at Old Dominion University in Virginia and his colleagues ran a web crawler between November 2017 and January 2019 to access 16,627 pages archived by 17 services in the US, Europe and some serving the entire internet. Four of the archives’ URIs changed during that time, affecting the ability for the crawler to find the archived pages.
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The four archives – the Library and Archives Canada, the National Library of Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and web archiving service Perma.cc – hosted 1981 web pages, 537 of which were affected. Of those, 20 of the web pages couldn’t be rediscovered on the internet at all, meaning they may be permanently lost. It isn’t known what information is gone – but its existence in national libraries and archives indicates it was considered worth keeping at one point.
“That doesn’t match anyone’s idea of what an archive should do,” says Nelson. The findings also concern at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a UK-based organisation trying to promote good archiving and preservation techniques.
“Being able to provide access to archives and demonstrate the integrity and authenticity of those archives are indeed issues that are very important to us and our members, and web archives are no exception,” she says. The DPC has its own web archiving and preservation working group.
Mitcham says the findings aren’t surprising, however. “Web archiving is challenging, increasing in volume and complexity, and underfunded,” she says. “It’s no surprise some issues occur.”
Nelson agrees: “Web archives aren’t anything magical,” he says. “They’re web pages like anything else.” All of that makes it more important to save everything for posterity – not just in our defined archive sites. “Your old tweets and my old tweets might not matter that much, but what about those of the next prime minister or president?” says Nelson.
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