Research Article (Preprint): “The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives”
The preprint linked to below was recently shared on arXiv.
Title
Authors
Nick Ruest
York University
Jimmy Lin
University of Waterloo
Ian Milligan
University of Waterloo
Samantha Fritz
University of Waterloo
Source
via arXiv
Abstract
The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building – all proceeding concurrently in mutually-reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate “derivative products”, using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from about two hundred users, totaling over 280 terabytes of web archives.
Direct to Full Text Article (Preprint)
10 pages; PDF.
Direct to Archives Unleashed Project Website
Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Conference Presentations, Data Files, Journal Articles, News, Patrons and Users
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.