Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Describing Web Archives: A Computer-Assisted Approach, Gregory Wiedeman

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Currently, web archives are challenging for users to discover and use. Many archives and libraries are actively collecting web archives, but description in this area has been dominated by bibliographic approaches, which do not connect web archives to existing description or contextual information, and have often resulted in format-based silos. This is primarily because web archiving tools such as Archive-It arrange materials by seeds and groups of seeds, which reflect the complex technical process of web crawling or web recording, and are often not very meaningful to users or helpful for discovery. This article makes the case for arranging and …