Human scale web collecting for individuals and institutions (Webrecorder workshop)Anna PerricciRhizome, United States of America In this workshop we’ll start by covering some fundamental concepts in web archiving including: defining terms, exploring main components of web archiving workflows and ethics of collecting, discussing how one can scope a web collection and how to share what’s collected. After the groundwork is laid we’ll begin creating collections with Webrecorder.io.
Webrecorder (webrecorder.io) is a free, easy to use, browser based web archiving tool set provided by Rhizome. Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum in New York City, champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, digital preservation, and software development. Webrecorder’s development has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
With Webrecorder you can make high fidelity interactive captures of web content as you browse web pages. A “high fidelity capture” means that from a user's perspective there is a complete or high level of similarity between the original web pages and the archived copies, including the retention of important characteristics and functionality such as: video or audio that requires a user to press ‘play’, or resources that require entry of login credentials for access (e.g. social media accounts). Webrecorder can capture most types of media files, JavaScript and user-triggered actions, which are things that most crawlers struggle with or are unable to obtain.
Workshop attendees will be given an overview of Webrecorder’s features, then engage in hands-on activities and discussions. Further instruction will alternate with opportunities for participants to use the tools introduced and share their thoughts or questions. Instructions on how to manage the collected materials, download them (as a WARC file), and open a local copy offline using Webrecorder Player will also be covered in this workshop.
Human scale web collecting, which entails capturing web pages one at a time ‘by hand’, with Webrecorder is not expected to meet all the requirements of every web archiving program but can satisfy many needs of researchers or smaller web collecting initiatives. Webrecorder can be a great tool for personal digital archiving projects as well. Larger web archiving programs can benefit from using Webrecorder to capture dynamic content and user-triggered behaviors on websites. The WARC files created with Webrecorder can be downloaded and ingested to join WARCs that have been created using crawler-based systems. WARCs created with other tools can also be uploaded into Webrecorder.
With Webrecorder anyone can get started with web archiving quickly at no cost, which is empowering both to information professionals and their stakeholders. Please join us for this workshop to learn how to together we can make web archiving a more inclusive practice and use Webrecorder to meet the project’s mission to provide ‘Web Archiving for All!’
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This workshop is part of Learn@DLF (our brand new pre-conference workshop day). Learn more and register for this session:
https://forum2018.diglib.org/learnatdlf/
