The digitization of displaced archives is of great historical and cultural significance. Through the construction of digital humanistic platforms represented by MISS platform, and the comprehensive application of IIIF technology, knowledge graph technology, ontology technology, and other popular information technologies. We can find that the digital framework of displaced archives built through the MISS platform can promote the establishment of a standardized cooperation and dialogue mechanism between the archives authoritiess and other government departments. At the same time, it can embed the works o fichives ction of digital government and the economy, promote the exploration of the integration of archives management, data management, and information resource management, and ultimately promote the construction of a digital society. By fostering a new partnership between archives departments and enterprises, think tanks, research institutes, and industry associations, the role of multiple social subjects in the modernization process of the archives governance system and governance capacity will be brought into play. The National Archives Administration has launched a special oper
Within the archival sector, digitization has long been a strategic initiative to ensure greater availability of historical documents. In recent years, the promotion of guidelines and standards, combined with technological advancements, has established methodologies and best practices and developed tools to facilitate massive digitization projects. However, despite the availability of technological solutions and guidelines, digitization is intended mostly to scan documents and make the outcome images available online. This practice can be problematic in representing the complex fonds structure made of relations, the archival bond that establishes the natural ordering of documents into archival units. This is particularly relevant when the fonds also has a multimedia component, such as an audiovisual component, that is often reproduced on different platforms disconnected from textual documents. This article addresses the challenges linked to digitization in the archival sector and proposes a methodological framework for representing fonds with respect to their native organization. For this purpose, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is employed to configure a s
The IANEC project (Investigation of Digital Archives of Contemporary Writers), led by the GREYC Research Lab and funded by the French Ministry of Culture aims to develop dedicated digital forensic investigation tools to automate the analysis of archival corpora from the Institut M{é}moires de l'{É}dition Contemporaine (IMEC). The project is based on the observation that born-digital archival materials are increasingly prevalent in contemporary archival institutions, and that digital forensics technologies have become essential for the extraction, identification, processing, and description of natively digital archival corpora.*
Digitization of historical records has produced a significant amount of data for analysis and interpretation. A critical challenge is the ability to relate historical information across different archives to allow for the data to be framed in the appropriate historical context. This paper presents a real-world case study on historical information integration and record matching with the goal to improve the historical value of archives containing data in the period 1800 to 1920. The archives contain unique information about Métis and Indigenous people in Canada and interactions with European settlers. The archives contain thousands of records that have increased relevance when relationships and interconnections are discovered. The contribution is a record linking approach suitable for historical archives and an evaluation of its effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate potential for discovering historical linkage with high precision enabling new historical discoveries.
Screenshots of social media posts are a common approach for information sharing. Unfortunately, before sharing a screenshot, users rarely verify whether the attribution of the post is fake or real. There are numerous legitimate reasons to share screenshots. However, sharing screenshots of social media posts is also a vector for mis-/disinformation spread on social media. We are exploring methods to verify the attribution of a social media post shown in a screenshot, using resources found on the live web and in web archives. We focus on the use of web archives, since the attribution of non-deleted posts can be relatively easily verified using the live web. We show how information from a Twitter screenshot (Twitter handle, timestamp, and tweet text) can be extracted and used for locating potential archived tweets in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We evaluate our method on a dataset of 1,571 single tweet screenshots.
Audiovisual (AV) archives are invaluable for holistically preserving the past. Unlike other forms, AV archives can be difficult to explore. This is not only because of its complex modality and sheer volume but also the lack of appropriate interfaces beyond keyword search. The recent rise in text-to-video retrieval tasks in computer science opens the gate to accessing AV content more naturally and semantically, able to map natural language descriptive sentences to matching videos. However, applications of this model are rarely seen. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, working with RTS (Télévision Suisse Romande), we identified the key blockers in a real archive for implementing such models. We built a functioning pipeline for encoding raw archive videos to the text-to-video feature vectors. Second, we designed and verified a method to encode and retrieve videos using emotionally abundant descriptions not supported in the original model. Third, we proposed an initial prototype for immersive and interactive exploration of AV archives in a latent space based on the previously mentioned encoding of videos.
The article examines the theoretical, methodological, and technical foundations of research on audiovisual corpora within the field of digital humanities. It outlines the main transversal issues underlying the processes of constructing, exploiting, and interpreting such corpora, which are conceived as specific forms of textual data in the broad sense - that is, as sets of semiotic traces (written, visual, sound, or multimodal) that make it possible to document, analyze, and transmit domains of knowledge. The analysis is organized around five complementary themes. The first concerns the status and structure of textual data lato sensu: any data, regardless of its medium, participates in a meaningful representation of a domain and therefore requires a unified theoretical and methodological framework based on a transdisciplinary semiotic approach. The second theme addresses the documentary value of data and corpora, understood as the relevance of materials for documenting a research object in relation to the goals and perspectives of the projects in which they are used. This value depends both on provenance and reasoned selection, and on the pragmatic context of their use. The third th
Information on archives from the 1950s of 15 astronomical observatories is provided beginning with a list of correspondence and other information related to astronomy of the Copenhagen University Observatory in the 1950s. The Appendix contains information from the 14 other observatories about their archives from those years, most of them having no archive at all. Public links are given to most of the files. - Print of the present list and the Danish astronomy archive itself will be placed at the Rigsarkivet, the Danish National Archives.
Archives are facing numerous challenges. On the one hand, archival assets are evolving to encompass digitized documents and increasing quantities of born-digital information in diverse formats. On the other hand, the audience is changing along with how it wishes to access archival material. Moreover, the interoperability requirements of cultural heritage repositories are growing. In this context, the Portuguese Archives started an ambitious program aiming to evolve its data model, migrate existing records, and build a new archival management system appropriate to both archival tasks and public access. The overall goal is to have a fine-grained and flexible description, more machine-actionable than the current one. This work describes ArchOnto, a linked open data model for archives, and rules for its automatic population from existing records. ArchOnto adopts a semantic web approach and encompasses the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and additional ontologies, envisioning interoperability with datasets curated by multiple communities of practice. Existing ISAD(G)-conforming descriptions are being migrated to the new model using the direct mappings provided here. We used a sample of
In recent years, journalists and other researchers have used web archives as an important resource for their study of disinformation. This paper provides several examples of this use and also brings together some of the work that the Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group has done in this area. We will show how web archives have been used to investigate changes to webpages, study archived social media including deleted content, and study known disinformation that has been archived.
Colonial archives are at the center of increased interest from a variety of perspectives, as they contain traces of historically marginalized people. Unfortunately, like most archives, they remain difficult to access due to significant persisting barriers. We focus here on one of them: the biases to be found in historical findings aids, such as indexes of person names, which remain in use to this day. In colonial archives, indexes can perpetuate silences by omitting to include mentions of historically marginalized persons. In order to overcome such limitations and pluralize the scope of existing finding aids, we propose using automated entity recognition. To this end, we contribute a fit-for-purpose annotation typology and apply it on the colonial archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). We release a corpus of nearly 70,000 annotations as a shared task, for which we provide baselines using state-of-the-art neural network models. Our work intends to stimulate further contributions in the direction of broadening access to (colonial) archives, integrating automation as a possible means to this end.
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.
Web archives are a historically valuable source of information. In some respects, web archives are the only record of the evolution of human society in the last two decades. They preserve a mix of personal and collective memories, the importance of which tends to grow as they age. However, the value of web archives depends on their users being able to search and access the information they require in efficient and effective ways. Without the possibility of exploring and exploiting the archived contents, web archives are useless. Web archive access functionalities range from basic browsing to advanced search and analytical services, accessed through user-friendly interfaces. Full-text and URL search have become the predominant and preferred forms of information discovery in web archives, fulfilling user needs and supporting search APIs that feed complex applications. Both full-text and URL search are based on the technology developed for modern web search engines, since the Web is the main resource targeted by both systems. However, while web search engines enable searching over the most recent web snapshot, web archives enable searching over multiple snapshots from the past. This m
The abundance of available sensor and derived data from large scientific experiments, such as earth observation programs, radio astronomy sky surveys, and high-energy physics already exceeds the storage hardware globally fabricated per year. To that end, cold storage data archives are the---often overlooked---spearheads of modern big data analytics in scientific, data-intensive application domains. While high-performance data analytics has received much attention from the research community, the growing number of problems in designing and deploying cold storage archives has only received very little attention. In this paper, we take the first step towards bridging this gap in knowledge by presenting an analysis of four real-world cold storage archives from three different application domains. In doing so, we highlight (i) workload characteristics that differentiate these archives from traditional, performance-sensitive data analytics, (ii) design trade-offs involved in building cold storage systems for these archives, and (iii) deployment trade-offs with respect to migration to the public cloud. Based on our analysis, we discuss several other important research challenges that need
We document the creation of a data set of 16,627 archived web pages, or mementos, of 3,698 unique live web URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) from 17 public web archives. We used four different methods to collect the dataset. First, we used the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Memento Aggregator to collect mementos of an initial set of URIs obtained from four sources: (a) the Moz Top 500, (b) the dataset used in our previous study, (c) the HTTP Archive, and (d) the Web Archives for Historical Research group. Second, we extracted URIs from the HTML of already collected mementos. These URIs were then used to look up mementos in LANL's aggregator. Third, we downloaded web archives' published lists of URIs of both original pages and their associated mementos. Fourth, we collected more mementos from archives that support the Memento protocol by requesting TimeMaps directly from archives, not through the Memento aggregator. Finally, we downsampled the collected mementos to 16,627 due to our constraints of a maximum of 1,600 mementos per archive and being able to download all mementos from each archive in less than 40 hours.
We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we describe a novel deep network architecture for computing compact temporal content hashes (TCHs) from audio-visual streams with durations of minutes or hours. Our TCHs are sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering) but invariant to the codec used to encode the video. This is necessary due to the curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of the United Kingdom, Estonia and Norway participated.
The creation of open archives i.e. archives where access is regulated by open licensing models (content, source, data), should be seen as part of a broader socio-economic phenomenon that finds legal expression in specific organizational and technical formats.This paper examines the origins and main characteristics of the open archives phenomenon. We investigate the extent to which different models of production of economic or social value can be expressed in different forms of licensing in the context of open archives. Through this process, we assess the extent to which the digital archive is moving towards providing access that is deeper (meaning, that offers more access rights) and wider (in the sense that most of the information given is in open content licensing) or face a gradual stratification and polarization of the content. Such stratification entails the emergence of two types of content: content to which access is extremely limited and content to which access remains completely open. This differentiation between classes of content is the result of multiple factors: from purely legislative, administrative and contractual restrictions (e.g. data protection and confidentiali
Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the Web to ensure that the information is preserved for future exploitation. However, despite the increasing number of web archives worldwide, the absence of efficient and meaningful exploration methods still remains a major hurdle in the way of turning them into a usable and useful information source. In this paper, we focus on this problem and propose an RDF/S model and a distributed framework for building semantic profiles ("layers") that describe semantic information about the contents of web archives. A semantic layer allows describing metadata information about the archived documents, annotating them with useful semantic information (like entities, concepts and events), and publishing all this data on the Web as Linked Data. Such structured repositories offer advanced query and integration capabilities, and make web archives directly exploitable by other systems and tools. To demonstrate their query capabilities, we build and query semantic layers for three different types of web archives. An experimental evaluation showed that a semantic layer can answer information needs that existing keyword-based systems are not able
Personal and private Web archives are proliferating due to the increase in the tools to create them and the realization that Internet Archive and other public Web archives are unable to capture personalized (e.g., Facebook) and private (e.g., banking) Web pages. We introduce a framework to mitigate issues of aggregation in private, personal, and public Web archives without compromising potential sensitive information contained in private captures. We amend Memento syntax and semantics to allow TimeMap enrichment to account for additional attributes to be expressed inclusive of the requirements for dereferencing private Web archive captures. We provide a method to involve the user further in the negotiation of archival captures in dimensions beyond time. We introduce a model for archival querying precedence and short-circuiting, as needed when aggregating private and personal Web archive captures with those from public Web archives through Memento. Negotiation of this sort is novel to Web archiving and allows for the more seamless aggregation of various types of Web archives to convey a more accurate picture of the past Web.
One in five arXiv articles published in 2021 contained a URI to a Git Hosting Platform (GHP), which demonstrates the growing prevalence of GHP URIs in scholarly publications. However, GHP URIs are vulnerable to the same reference rot that plagues the Web at large. The disappearance of software hosting platforms, like Gitorious and Google Code, and the source code they contain threatens research reproducibility. Archiving the source code and development history available in GHPs enables the long-term reproducibility of research. Software Heritage and Web archives contain archives of GHP URI resources. However, are the GHP URIs referenced by scholarly publications contained within the Software Heritage and Web archive collections? We analyzed a dataset of GHP URIs extracted from scholarly publications to determine (1) is the URI still publicly available on the live Web?, (2) has the URI been archived by Software Heritage?, and (3) has the URI been archived by Web archives? Of all GHP URIs, we found that 93.98% were still publicly available on the live Web, 68.39% had been archived by Software Heritage, and 81.43% had been archived by Web archives.