What's cached is prologue: Reviewing recent web archives research towards supporting scholarly use

Abstract

Web archives are essential to support historical scholarship in the online age. Research on web archives spans many disciplines, often requiring domain‐specific expertise. The wide‐ranging nature of the literature makes it difficult to obtain a current overview of the field, but this view is needed to identify which core challenges define the field, and assess the different approaches taken to address them. This paper provides such a review of the current landscape of web archives research, focusing on addressing the common challenges faced to support scholarly use of archived web materials. The analysis describes three challenges and identifies key concepts and current approaches for each: (1) how to organize and select from web archives collections; (2) how to critically examine these sources; and (3) how to approach ethics and consent for using archived web materials. The discussion addresses open questions and tensions, highlighting the sociotechnical nature of these challenges and revealing opportunities to apply existing work from the body of knowledge of information studies. It concludes with several recommendations for future research directions to support scholarly use of web archives.

‘Go fish’: Conceptualising the challenges of engaging national web archives for digital research

“…These challenges have been collated elsewhere, including Maemura (2018) who synthesises common problems, such as defining a corpus of study within web archival collections, evaluating the suitability of collected materials and considering the implications of ethics and consent. Most recently, Vlassenroot et al (2019) review the landscape of web archiving activities within the European context, and summarise four 'important considerations' for digital scholarship, including: how and why selection activities take place, the access conditions and legal frameworks that govern web archives, and the 'high level of technical knowledge' required to contextualise and make use of collections data.…”