Web Archiving

The public information available on the Web today is larger than information distributed on any other media. The raw nature of Web content, the unpredictable remote changes that can affect it, the wide variety of formats concerned, and the growth in data-driven websites make the preservation of this material a challenging task, requiring specific monitoring, collecting and preserving strategies, procedures and tools.

Julien Masanès, Director of the European Archive, has assembled contributions from computer scientists and librarians that altogether encompass the complete range of tools, tasks and processes needed to successfully preserve the cultural heritage of the Web. His book serves as a standard introduction for everyone involved in keeping alive the immense amount of online information, and it covers issues related to building, using and preserving Web archives both from the computer scientist and librarian viewpoints.

Practitioners will find in this book a state-of-the-art overview of methods, tools and standards they need for their activities. Researchers as well as advanced students in computer science will use it as an introduction to this new field with a hopefully stimulating review of open issues where future work is needed.

Julien Masanès is a cofounder and the Director of the European Archive, a non-profit foundation for Web preservation and digital cultural access. Before this he had directed the Web Archiving Project at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) since 2000. He also participated very actively in the creation of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), which he coordinated during its first two years.

He is a curator and received a degree in librarianship at ENSSIB (Lyon) in 1999. He was a digital preservation adviser at BnF and has participated in various national and international initiatives in this domain, such as the European Project NEDLIB, the Global Digital Format Registry and the OCLC/RLG Open Archive Information System Certification Group. He has numerous publications in this field, and he launched and presently chairs the International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) series, the main international rendezvous in this domain.