Archive of Archives

Digital archives were created to address issues around the disappearance of digital information by preserving them in catalogued collections. However, there is still a concern of archives themselves disappearing, particularly those in low resource environments. This research is being conducted around preserving archives themselves in a new experimental type of archiving system.

Overview

Introduction

Digital archives are crucial in preserving digital items of the past and present for use in the future. They are inherently reliant on larger organisations as they require funding, time and expertise to construct and maintain. Because of this, they are at risk if something happens to that organisation, resulting in the loss of knowledge. This is particularly prevalent in low resource environments, commonplace in Africa. A new type of system, an archive of archives, was therefore developed to enable the public preservation of archives that were built using popular archiving tools.

Aim

The aim of our project is to create a safe haven for archives by expanding a current digital library system called SimpleDL, into an archive called the Archives of Archives. The Archive of Archives creates accurate snapshots of archives and preserves them in a simple flat file system. The core components of this Archive of Archives are: user interface, versioning, admin tool and archive indexing feature.

Project Outcomes

  • Successful snapshot creation and indexing by linking archive items from a custom archive web scraper and item metadata harvester.
  • Successful snapshot versioning.
  • User Interface that successfully displays multiple archive snapshots.
  • Easy to use archive admin tool that can add, remove and modify archives.

Research

Archive of Archives: User Interface

Creating an archive of archive user interface requires providing features that differentiate it from a standard archive. The current User Interface prototype implemented three points of differentiation. First, displaying what the stored digital archive originally looked like so that it is clear it is a full archive and not just a digital record. Second, to show the evolution of the archive over time, giving people insight into how archives change even when their individual records stay the same. Finally, providing a way for administrators to add and manage full archives rather than the standard archive records. All these features were evaluated on their usability through user interviews. Thematic analysis on the results showed that the presented features were all easy to use and easy to learn, which suggests that the proposed features will be suitable for future work into an archive of archives.

~ By Callum Fraser

Archive of Archives: Archive Ingestor

Archives are meant to be a safe haven for information however many archives can simply disappear due to a variety of reasons such as lack of funding, world events such as natural disasters or wars. In addition changes to archives over time are not documented anyway where. This a problem simply because it takes valuable information out of circulation and is often never returned. In order to solve this problem, an archive that is able to store other archives called the Archive of Archives will be created. This archive will be comprised of four components: UI, Repository, Ingestor and Web-scraper. This paper presents a part of the solution of this problem which is the design of the Ingestor tool. The objective of this tool is to ingest and version a web-scraped archive into the repository without any data loss occurring.

~ By Craig Stevenson

Archive of Archives: Archive Collector

Digital archives form a critical component of research; however, they are complex structures, which usually fall on organizations to keep and maintain. However, this does not provide certainty of their persistence or a means to easily share archives, in low resource environments. A need therefore arises from these findings. A new breed of archive, an “Archive of Archives” was therefore constructed to try and fulfill this need. To build this archive, a means of extracting data from the original archives was needed. Data was extracted by creating snapshots of these archive websites, using a custom Web scraper, with focus on sites created using popular archiving toolkits. Results indicated that these snapshots could replicate the original archive sites to a good visual degree, however missing functionality severely affects the main use case and therefore usability for users.

~ By Alex Olivier

Resources

Download the resources of the project.

Project Proposal

The initial project proposal for the archive of archives.

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Poster

The project poster for the archive of archives.

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Callum's Literature Review

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Callum's Final Paper

Callum's research focused on the User Interface (UI) for an archive of archives.

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Alex's Literature Review

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Alex's Final Paper

Alex's research focused on the collection of archive data for an archive of archives.

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Alex's Code

Code for the collection of archiving data.

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Craig's Literature Review

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Craig's Final Paper

Craig's research focused on the ingestion of archive data for an archive of archives.

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