The document summarizes tools developed by the Web Sciences and Digital Libraries Group for managing archived web content. It describes WARCreate, a Chrome extension that archives the current state of web pages; WAIL, which loads archived web pages (WARC files) into a local Wayback instance for viewing; and Mink, a Chrome extension that displays archived versions of visited pages. It also discusses techniques for assessing damage in archived pages, generating thumbnail summaries of archive collections, and detecting off-topic pages within archives. The tools are intended to make web archiving more accessible and help curate archived web collections.

1. Tools for Managing the Past Web
Michele C. Weigle
Web Sciences and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Group
Department of Computer Science
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA
Includes joint work with Michael L. Nelson and our PhD students, Yasmin AlNoamany, Ahmed
AlSum (PhD 2014), Justin Brunelle, Mat Kelly, Hany SalahEldeen
Archive-It Partners Meeting
November 18, 2014

2. Outline
Start-Up and
Implementation Grants
– WARCreate
– WAIL
– Mink
– Assessing Memento
Damage
Web Archiving Incentive
– Thumbnail
Summarization
– Detecting Off-Topic
Mementos
WARCreate WAIL Mink
https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/Software
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 2

3. Archive What I See Now
• Standard web archiving
tools are difficult for non
IT experts.
• "Save Page As" is not
suitable for archiving
purposes.
• Pages are behind
authentication.
• Pages change quickly,
but current state needs
archiving.
NEH Digital Humanities Implementation Grant, 2014-2017, http://bit.ly/odu-dhig-2014
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting
3

4. How we're addressing the problem
Google Chrome extension
Archive the current state of the
page in standard Web Archive
(WARC) format
Compatible with Wayback
WARCreate
Kelly and Weigle, "WARCreate - Create Wayback-Consumable WARC Files from Any Webpage", JCDL 2012
Kelly, Weigle, and Nelson. "WARCreate - Create Wayback-Consumable WARC Files from Any Webpage," Digital Preservation 2012, Tools Demo Session
4
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting

5. WARCreate - Work in Progress
• New modes of operation
– record mode
• while activated, add capture of each page visited
to the WARC
– countdown mode
• every interval, refresh and add new capture of
page
– event mode
• add new capture of page every time it dynamically
reloads or refreshes
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 5

6. WARCreate - Work in Progress
• Uploading created WARCs to Archive-It
or other archives
– consideration of data integrity
– merging local WARCs with crawled WARCs
• how do we account for your www.facebook.com vs.
my www.facebook.com?
– privacy
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 6

7. What to do with created WARCs?
WAIL
Load created WARCs into a
Wayback instance on your local
computer
Single-click install of Wayback
(and other archiving tools)
Includes IIPC's OpenWayback 2.0
and Heritrix 3.2
Available for Windows, OS X
(Linux coming soon!)
Kelly, Weigle, and Nelson. "Making Enterprise-Level Archive Tools Accessible for Personal Web Archiving," Personal Digital Archiving 2013, Poster Session
Kelly, Nelson, and Weigle. "WARCreate and WAIL: WARC, Wayback and Heritrix Made Easy," Digital Preservation 2013
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 7

8. WAIL - Work in Progress
• More tools
– integration with Ilya Kreymer's pywb
• User interface enhancements
– ease of installation
– intuitive GUI
– configuration of Wayback display and Heritrix
crawls
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 8

9. Bridging the gap between the past
web and the live web
Google Chrome extension
For each page you visit, displays
the number of archived versions
available
Provides access by date
Allows for submission to public
archiving services
Mink
Kelly, Nelson and Weigle, "Mink: Integrating the Live and Archived Web Viewing Experience Using Web Browsers and Memento," poster, ACM/IEEE Digital
Libraries (DL), September 2014.
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting
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10. Mink - Work in Progress
• Pick public archives (Memento
Aggregator) or private archive (local
computer)
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 10

11. Tools
Archive-It Partners Meeting
WARCreate
Mink
WAIL
11
https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/Software
November 18, 2014

12. Outline
Start-Up and
Implementation Grants
– WARCreate
– WAIL
– Mink
– Assessing Memento
Damage
Web Archiving Incentive
– Thumbnail
Summarization
– Detecting Off-Topic
Mementos
WAIL Mink
https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/Software
WARCreate
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 12

13. How damaged are these mementos?
M = percentage missing
D = our damage metric
Archive-It Partners Meeting
M = 0.17
D = 0.09
(live web)
M = 0.24
D = 0.41
(missing main) M = 0.29
D = 0.36
(missing logo + navigation)
Brunelle, Kelly, SalahEldeen, Weigle, and Nelson, "Not All Mementos Are Created Equal: Measuring the Impact of Missing Resources",
IEEE/ACM Digital Libraries (DL) 2014, Best Student Paper
November 18, 2014 13

14. Good News:
Although M is steady/increasing, D is decreasing
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting
14
M = percentage missing
D = our damage metric
Sampled 45,000 URI-Ms
- one URI-M each year of ~1850 URI-Rs
- URI-Rs from Bitly URIs shared over Twitter and Archive-It collections

15. Outline
Start-Up and
Implementation Grants
– WARCreate
– WAIL
– Mink
– Assessing Memento
Damage
Web Archiving Incentive
– Thumbnail
Summarization
– Detecting Off-Topic
Mementos
WAIL Mink
https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/Software
WARCreate
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 15

16. Browsing TimeMaps
How were
these 4
thumbnails
chosen?
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 16

17. Which tells you more about the
past of www.apple.com?
700 thumbnails
(not even all of them!)
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting
32 sampled thumbnails
17
AlSum and Nelson, "Thumbnail Summarization Techniques for Web Archives", ECIR 2014

18. Thumbnail Summarization
• Process
– compare HTML of consecutive mementos
• more efficient than image diff
– when diff threshold passed, generate thumbnail
– return data + thumbnail as JSON
• Considerations
– diff threshold too low -> near duplicate images
– diff threshold too high -> miss important changes
• Work in Progress
– wayback plugin
– embeddable version
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 18

19. Thumbnail Summary Screencast
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 19

20. Outline
Start-Up and
Implementation Grants
– WARCreate
– WAIL
– Mink
– Assessing Memento
Damage
Web Archiving Incentive
– Thumbnail
Summarization
– Detecting Off-Topic
Mementos
WAIL Mink
https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/Software
WARCreate
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 20

21. Have you ever had this problem?
May 21, 2012
May 16, 2013
nothing but spam
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 21

22. Detecting Off-Topic Mementos
• Goal: Build a tool to alert curators of
potential off-topic mementos in a collection
• Compare text of mementos
– Intersection of top terms (TF)
– Cosine similarity
– Jaccard similarity coefficient
– Clustering with topic modeling
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 22

23. Test Collections
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 23

24. Turns out to be rather difficult
• Egyptian Revolution
– lots of non-English pages
• Occupy Movement
– lots of Facebook and social media pages
– template extractors have trouble with these
• Boston Marathon Bombing
but we're making progress
(stay tuned!)
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 24

25. Storytelling For Archives
Storytelling services Archived collections
Archived enriched
stories
AlNoamany, "Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling", TCDL Bulletin, December 2013.
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 25

26. Story Types
Fixed Page – Fixed Time:
differences in GeoIP,
mobile, etc.
Fixed Page – Sliding Time:
evolution of a single page
(or domain) through time
Sliding Page – Fixed Time:
different perspectives on a
point in time
Sliding Page – Sliding Time:
broadest possible coverage
of a collection
same
Time
different
URI
same
different
Issues: topic modeling, eliminating duplicates, maximizing
novelty, structural & content quality
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 26

27. Tools for Storytelling
• Tools for Curators
– create stories from your collections
• candidate mementos automatically selected
– use existing stories to augment your
collections
• Tools for Users
– use existing tools like Storify to view the
stories of a collection
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 27

28. Tools for Managing the Past Web
Start-Up and Implementation
Grants
– WARCreate
– WAIL
– Mink
– Assessing Memento Damage
Web Archiving Incentive
– Thumbnail Summarization
– Detecting Off-Topic
Mementos
Web Science and Digital
Libraries (WS-DL) Group
@WebSciDL
http://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/
http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/
Michele C. Weigle
mweigle@cs.odu.edu
@weiglemc
http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mweigle/
WAIL Mink
WARCreate
https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/Software
November 18, 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting 28