Creating order from the mess: web archive derivative datasets and notebooks

Nick Ruest, Samantha Fritz & Ian Milligan (2022) Creating order from the mess: web archive derivative datasets and notebooks, Archives and Records, 43:3, 316-331, DOI: 10.1080/23257962.2022.2100336

For a quarter-century, memory institutions have been preserving web-based content. These web archives have been collected and stored in ARC and WARC (W/ARC) file formats and will form a basis for contemporary histories. Yet, these formats present significant challenges to researchers who wish to access and use web archival data. This is primarily due to the nature of collecting, storing, and providing access to these multifaceted digital objects. In other words, web archives are messy. Applying traditional archival methods of description to digital-born collections is complicated due to issues of provenance, original order, and scale. However, we believe that archival description offers a practical starting point for thinking about access. This paper argues a robust finding aid must extend beyond basic collection-level description to allow for more meaningful interactions with web archives. As such, we propose a reimagining of a traditional finding-aid model into a three-level mode of description to include computational methods, the generation of derivative datasets, and interactive code-rich notebooks. These three factors combine to ultimately contribute to the expanded access and use of web archives.