Book “The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives” available in Green Open access!

Last updated on September 23rd, 2024 at 03:09 pm

Since 2006, a book has not been published that reflects the state-of-the-art in the area of web preservation and the research that has been conducted on web archives.

The main goal of the new book The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives was to create a new, up-to-date resource to educate more people in the field of web preservation and to make web archives known to researchers and academics.

As such, the book is primarily aimed at the academic and scientific communities, and presents the most innovative methods for exploring information from the past preserved by web archives.

Daniel Gomes, head of Arquivo.pt led the book’s editorial team, along with the field specialists Elena Demidova, Jane Winters and Thomas Risse. In total, the book resulted from the contributions of 40 authors from around the world who are experts in web archiving.

The book is divided into 6 parts where we find various resources for exploring pages archived from the Internet since the 1990s.

We can also learn how to preserve our collective memory in the Digital Era, which strategies to use when selecting online content, and what impact web archives have on preserving historical information.

The book aims to support professors in their mission to transmit innovative and adequate knowledge for the digital literacy required to train professionals for the 21st century.

Daniel Gomes from Arquivo.pt, alerts to the need of including web archives in teaching plans and emphasizes that this knowledge brings a great competitive advantage especially for students of Humanities and Social Sciences.

An innovative detail of this book is that all its cited links have been preserved by Arquivo.pt so that the references remain valid over time.

The book was available for free to be downloaded from Portuguese higher education institutions (b-On member entities) until March 6th 2022.

However, you can still download a pre-print version of the book (Green Open Access).