Nick Ruest

Content Selection and Curation for Web Archiving: The Gatekeepers vs. the Masses

Any preservation effort must begin with an assessment of what content to preserve, and web archiving is no different. There have historically been two answers to the question “what should we archive?” The Internet Archives broad entire-web crawls have been supplemented by narrower domain-or topic-specific collections gathered by numerous libraries. We can characterize this as content selection and curation by “gatekeepers”. In contrast, we have witnessed the emergence of another approach driven by “the masses” - we can archive pages that are contained in social media streams such as Twitter. The interesting question, of course, is how these approaches differ. We provide an answer to this question in the context of a case study about the 2015 Canadian federal elections. Based on our analysis, we recommend a hybrid approach that combines an effort driven by social media and more traditional curatorial methods.

Desiderata for Exploratory Search Interfaces to Web Archives in Support of Scholarly Activities

Web archiving initiatives around the world capture ephemeral web content to preserve our collective digital memory. In this paper, we describe initial experiences in providing an exploratory search interface to web archives for humanities scholars and social scientists. We describe our initial implementation and discuss our findings in terms of desiderata for such a system. It is clear that the standard organization of a search engine results page (SERP), consisting of an ordered list of hits, is inadequate to support the needs of scholars. Shneidermans mantra for visual information seeking (“overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand”) provides a nice organizing principle for interface design, to which we propose an addendum: “Make everything transparent”. We elaborate on this by highlighting the importance of the temporal dimension of web pages as well as issues surrounding metadata and veracity.