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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Old Dominion University

Computer Sciences

Web archiving

2007

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown Oct 2007

Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Backup or preservation of websites is often not considered until after a catastrophic event has occurred. In the face of complete website loss, webmasters or concerned third parties have attempted to recover some of their websites from the Internet Archive. Still others have sought to retrieve missing resources from the caches of commercial search engines. Inspired by these post hoc reconstruction attempts, this dissertation introduces the concept of lazy preservation{ digital preservation performed as a result of the normal operations of the Web Infrastructure (web archives, search engines and caches). First, the Web Infrastructure (WI) is characterized by its preservation …


Factors Affecting Website Reconstruction From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown, Norou Diawara, Michael L. Nelson Jun 2007

Factors Affecting Website Reconstruction From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown, Norou Diawara, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

When a website is suddenly lost without a backup, it may be reconstituted by probing web archives and search engine caches for missing content. In this paper we describe an experiment where we crawled and reconstructed 300 randomly selected websites on a weekly basis for 14 weeks. The reconstructions were performed using our web-repository crawler named Warrick which recovers missing resources from the Web Infrastructure (WI), the collective preservation effort of web archives and search engine caches. We examine several characteristics of the websites over time including birth rate, decay and age of resources. We evaluate the reconstructions when compared …


Brass: A Queueing Manager For Warrick, Frank Mccown, Amine Benjelloun, Michael L. Nelson Jan 2007

Brass: A Queueing Manager For Warrick, Frank Mccown, Amine Benjelloun, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

When an individual loses their website and a backup can-not be found, they can download and run Warrick, a web-repository crawler which will recover their lost website by crawling the holdings of the Internet Archive and several search engine caches. Running Warrick locally requires some technical know-how, so we have created an on-line queueing system called Brass which simplifies the task of recovering lost websites. We discuss the technical aspects of recon-structing websites and the implementation of Brass. Our newly developed system allows anyone to recover a lost web-site with a few mouse clicks and allows us to track which …