#webarchives — Public Fediverse posts

Stephen Follows: What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all. “Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even […]

Library of Congress: Remembering the Past, Preserving the Present: The America 250 Semiquincentennial Web Archive. “The America 250 Semiquincentennial Web Archive documents how Americans are commemorating and reflecting on the nation’s 250th anniversary. In this interview, Malea Walker discusses how the collection evolved from a project focused on government websites into a broader effort to […]

Shortened links? Expand them and save the URLs

Shortened links are a digital preservation and web archiving nightmare. You can imagine how they need to work:

Create a unique short code for a given (target) URL (like a hash, but far far shorter)

Pair the short code with your URL in a database.

Create a redirect rule on the URL shortening server from the new source URL to the target URL.

Send the shortened link to the caller, e.g. shortURL.com/123badf00d

In-perpetuity: continue to pay for your domain; maintain the database; look after redirect rules during server migrations; ensure duplicate short-codes are not created.

A URL-shortening business in five easy steps.

But what does that mean for digital preservation?

University of Washington: GovScape lets you easily search millions of government documents. “At the end of every presidential term, the End of Term Web Archive preserves that administration’s web presence as a vast trove of documents and webpages. The archive began in 2008, with George W. Bush’s second term, and runs up to 2024, collecting images, text, graphs, redacted pages and other […]

Why we do this work…

There aren’t many rewards in a discipline that is about taking the long term view but occasionally something comes up that you can take some pride in.

Last month, Ed Summers put out a call on Mastodon: digipres.club where he was wrestling with a CD-R format that was difficult to recognize. The disks likely held precious data belonging to his late brother.

Much of the search area had already been examined and narrowed down by folks in the community, including Misty de Meo, Roxi Ruuska, Ethan Gates, and Johan van der Knijff who all contributed suggestions and analysis..

Ed was able to share a copy of one of his disk images, and I had some time that I could dedicate to taking a look as well.

Long-story short, we were able to identify the disks, and Ed has written up the background here: https://inkdroid.org/2026/06/12/tascam/

The situation might be familiar to others: a digital file that isn’t recognized by the major file format identification tools, and yet, because of its context, you know it is something that might be important.

I have different experiences with these types of files, sometimes they are valuable (and you want to look after them), sometimes they are not (and it can still benefit you to get rid of them). The process of finding this out often follows a similar path.

In this instance the files turned out to be incredibly valuable and I wanted to elaborate on the path of discovery. Even though it really isn’t very sophisticated, I hope it will be helpful to those with unidentified digital records who might find the task of identifying them quite daunting.

So, the #WaybackMachine does have snapshots of the Institute of Urban Homesteading, whose motto is "Agitate, Educate, Pollinate!"

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://iuhoakland.com/

#SolarPunkSunday #WebArchives #UrbanHomesteading

how can we use the internet to study the internet? look forward to co-learning workshop on digital methods for studying internet culture at Seoul National University, 8-9th June 2026 - with Chamee Yang @lbngr Jisu Lee & more! ✨🐰🐨🦔🐢🐬 https://jonathangray.org/2026/05/28/snu-workshop
#seoul #internetstudies #internetarchive #webarchives #digitalmethods

what is the datafied web? how to study it? and reimagine it? we chat in Internet Histories journal ✨🐰🦔🐨🐢🦉🐿️🦙🦆💬 https://jonathangray.org/2026/05/18/datafied-web
with @nthylstrup Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, @sebgiessmann @annehelmond Ian Milligan & Valérie Schafer.
come for the datafied web - stay for the AI #slop #adtech #deepfakes #bots #leaks #trolls #bubbles #linkrot #fintech #osint #dataloss #softwaredecay #venturecapital #platformlabour #webarchives #diywebsites #algorithms #surveillancecapitalism #poeticcomputation & more 😋

@WvOostveen Misschien helpt het mensen soms over de streep om toch maar een abonnement te nemen? Goede #journalistiek is belangrijk.

Zelf doe ik er vrijwel altijd wel een archief-linkje bij, zodat iedereen het kan lezen en het artikel ook voor het nageslacht bewaard blijft.

Daar is ook een gemakkelijke add-on voor beschikbaar:

https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

#archive #webarchives

National Library of Finland: Principles for Finnish Web Archive content selection published. “The National Library of Finland is responsible for the diverse and representative preservation of online material. To make this work more transparent, we produced a document entitled Content selection for the Finnish Web Archive, outlining the principles for content selection in thematic and continuous […]

Tom’s Hardware: Internet archival sites struggling to preserve the internet because of skyrocketing hard drive prices due to the AI boom — Wayback Machine and Wikimedia punished by stratospheric storage pricing and stricter anti-scraping measures blocking the wrong bots. “The internet is getting harder to archive because the AI boom has caused a storage crisis, with both NAND and mechanical […]

📯This week in #DigitalHistoryOFK: Jane Winters (University of London) presents “From ‘digital dark age’ to ‘an age of historical abundance’?” on born-digital cultural heritage. Exploring web archives, social media & personal data, the talk reflects on preservation, infrastructures & historical value.
📅6 May 2026, 16–18 CET (Zoom)
ℹ️Info: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/13238
#4memory #WebArchives #DigitalPreservation
@historikerinnen
@histodons
@digitalhumanities

New-to-me, from Library of Congress: Preserving U.S. Indigenous Government Websites: From Directory to Digital Archive. “As a 2025 Junior Fellow, Maggie Jones helped build the United States Indigenous Government Websites Web Archive with the guidance of her mentor, Giselle Aviles. In this interview, they describe how the collection developed from a list of over 500 tribes and what that process […]

Popular Science: The Internet Archive records its 1 trillionth website. “The Internet Archive—one of cyberspace’s most essential library projects—has achieved a feat that’s hard to even conceptualize. After nearly 30 years of painstaking work, the nonprofit has preserved its trillionth webpage.”

Ars Technica: Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links. “In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger […]

Enter a world of mystic cats & feminist histories 🐈✨

Internet Archive’s latest Artist in Residence, Cindy Rehm, brings the Archive’s collections to life in THE SEERS.

Drawing from historic books on women, mysticism, cats, and craft, Rehm transforms archival fragments into a new feminist visual language full of symbolism, texture, and playful esoteric threads.

Learn more ⤵️
https://blog.archive.org/2026/02/19/the-seers-mystic-cats-feminist-histories-and-the-art-of-the-archive/

@internetarchive #ArtistInResidence #WebArchives #FeministArt #CollageArt

🧵 Curious how researchers, journalists, and artists dig into the web’s past? 🌐

WAYS OF WORKING WITH THE WAYBACK MACHINE shows how the #WaybackMachine opens up discovery & creativity from tracking platform changes to investigating misinformation & remixing archived sites.

A recent gathering at Internet Archive Europe shared methods, tools, and collaborations shaping digital research and media art.

Learn more ⤵️
https://www.internetarchive.eu/2026/02/18/ways-of-working-with-the-wayback-machine/

#WebArchives #DigitalResearch @internetarchiveeurope

Library of Congress: From Print Volumes to Digital Scholarship: The Handbook of Latin American Studies Web Archive. “Since the 1930s, the Handbook of Latin American Studies has documented scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean. In this interview, Tracy North describes how that long-standing mission now extends to web archiving, ensuring long-term access to web-based research materials. […]

Library of Congress: Web Archiving at the Library After 25 Years. “The Web Archiving Program started as a small pilot program to archive the 2000 Presidential election. The following year, the September 11th attacks happened. Suddenly, there was a lot of material online about the terrorist attacks. The Library and some external partners quickly ramped up web archiving efforts to try to preserve […]

Alex Chan: Hard problems in social media archiving. “Institutional archiving has different constraints to individual collections – institutions serve a much wider audience, so their decisions need consistency and boundaries. My own scrapbook is tiny and personal, and comparing it alongside institutional efforts really highlights the differences and difficulties. It’s why I usually call it a […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/12/15/alex-chan-hard-problems-in-social-media-archiving/

Many thanks to @[email protected] for hosting a great workshop where @[email protected] shared lessons from @[email protected]. #InternetArchive #WebArchives #InternetData #Research #DataTrust #DigitalPreservation /1

Library of Congress Blogs: Where Science Meets Storytelling: Twelve Years of the Science Blogs Web Archive. ” More than a decade after its launch, the Science Blogs Web Archive continues to grow and evolve. In this interview, Jennifer ‘JJ’ Harbster reflects on building and maintaining the collection, while intern Yahir Brito brings a fresh perspective on updating and expanding it. Together, […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/12/05/where-science-meets-storytelling-twelve-years-of-the-science-blogs-web-archive-library-of-congress-blogs/

🔎How about some literature ? Here are some wonderful texts, articles and research on Lost Media (because it’s fun 🙂) :
Hanáková’s thesis surrounding the lost star wipe effect : Lost Media: Collecting and Archiving of Artefacts from the Digital Era

https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/175778/120427589.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

#lostmedia #lostwave #research #webarchives #internet #internetarchives

National Library of Finland: Stepping up to the plate – Saving the Finnish baseball season. “The most recent Finnish baseball season was full of twists and debates. The National Library of Finland preserved online content related to the sport during the 2025 season.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/11/24/national-library-of-finland-stepping-up-to-the-plate-saving-the-finnish-baseball-season/