2025 – sobre.arquivo.pt

Thematic collections to discover in the online sessions “Café with Arquivo.pt”

March 31, 2026November 27, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on March 31st, 2026 at 01:05 pm

“Café with Arquivo.pt” consists of short online sessions so that anyone can attend during working hours. Its aim is to raise awareness of Arquivo.pt and gather contributions from the community on topics related to web preservation.

In December 2025, a new series was launched dedicated to the thematic collections that Arquivo.pt publishes as datasets on the Dados.Gov open data platform. For example, websites related to theater, music, schools, parishes, elections, and other topics are preserved in the Arquivo.pt. We aim to highlight sets of websites whose history is preserved in the Arquivo.pt to improve their preservation.

Next session

April 15 – Replacing “Coffee with Arquivo.pt”, an online session in collaboration with the Bridges – Ponte Cultural project, CIDEHUS, Universidade de Évora, dedicated to the topic of “Immigration.”

The work Narrative Monitoring: Analysis of Conspiracy Theories on Population Replacement in the Portuguese Web Archive (1996–2021), which placed third in the 2025 Arquivo.pt Award, authored by Erik Bran Marino, Rafael Prezado, Ana Sofia Ribeiro, and Renata Vieira, will be presented.

Arquivo.pt is contributing to this session by presenting a special collection on the topic, collected this month.

Guest speakers: Erik Bran Marino, Rafael Prezado

Held sessions

24/03/2026 – Feminist activism and digital memory: archival practices and fragile data

Guest speakers: Carla Cerqueira, Universidade Lusófona, and Daniel Cardoso, Universidade Lusófona and NOVA-FCSH
Data: 24 de março de 2026, das 15 às 16 horas
Registration required (free). Closed.
Satisfaction Survey – Give us your opinion about the Arquivo.pt sessions (anonymous, 1 minute)

Materials

Summary

The online sessions “Coffee with Arquivo.pt” aim to raise awareness of efforts in Portugal to preserve content published on the Internet and to encourage participation by researchers and the public. The highlight of this session is the project “FEMglocal – Glocal Feminist Movements: Interactions and Contradictions.” A theoretical framework will be presented, followed by a presentation and discussion of the results and activities carried out. For example, identifying websites and other digital channels used by feminist movements has yielded a useful dataset for studying the topic. This raises the question: how can we archive all this fragile digital content circulating on the Internet? As a contribution from Arquivo.pt, we will briefly demonstrate how to collect thousands of pieces of content published on the Web about a specific topic—for example, feminism.

“FEMglocal – Glocal Feminist Movements: Interactions and Contradictions” (PTDC/COM-CSS/4049/2021 / DOI 10.54499/PTDC/COM-CSS/4049/2021), a project funded by national funds through the FCT — Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P. With the participation of DivIntLab (CICANT). With the participation of the DigiPlArt Exploratory Project (2024.13064.PEX), also funded through the FCT.

Learn more about the project: www.femglocal.pt

3/12/2025 – Local elections: how we archive websites and election programmes

Guest speakers: Mário Rui André e Gonçalo Pereira Costa – LPP / Lisboa Para Pessoas newspaper
Date: december 3, 2025
Language: Portuguese, translation do English available on Zoom
Registration (free). Closed.

Materials

Summary

Guests Mário Rui André and Gonçalo Pereira Costa, journalists from the newspaper LPP / Lisboa Para Pessoas, talked to us about the Portal das Autárquicas da Lisboa Metropolitana (Lisbon Metropolitan Local Elections Portal) they created, which provides information about the candidates and their electoral programmes. Arquivo.pt has collected thousands of electoral pages and websites, more than 3 terabytes of information, and briefly explained the methodology used.

In this session, you will learn

How the local elections in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area went from a journalistic perspective;
What methodology was used to collect electoral content on the Internet;
How to use the web archive to obtain information from the past.

Previous seasons

In-person session dedicated to arquivo.pt closes the “Archives of Knowledge” cycle

December 16, 2025November 7, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on December 16th, 2025 at 08:12 pm

On 19 November, the last session of 2025 of the cycle Archives of Knowledge: Science, History and Memory (Arquivos do Saber: Ciência, História e Memória) cycle took place, an initiative of the FCT Science and Technology Archive.

The event took place in the small auditorium of the FCCN premises, FCT’s digital services unit, at Avenida do Brasil, 101, in Lisbon.

More than 30 participants attended, and it was an opportunity for them to learn more about Arquivo.pt.

Event programme

This session openned with speeches by Maria Paula Diogo, member of the Board of Directors of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Paula Meireles, coordinator of the Science and Technology Archive (Arquivo de Ciência e Tecnologia), and João Nuno Ferreira, vice-president of FCT and general coordinator of the digital services unit, FCCN.

The guest speakers are Rúben Almeida, from INESC TEC – FEUP, who will give a presentation entitled Minha Região – O Teu Portal Autárquico, and Joaquim José, from the Instituto Politécnico da Guarda, who will talk about Memor.pt – Explore a Memória Digital Portuguesa, both winners of the Arquivo.pt 2025 Award, 1st and 2nd places, respectively. The session will be moderated by João Gomes, area director of FCCN, FCT’s digital services unit.

19 November programme – ‘Arquivos do Saber’ cycle

The Science and Technology Archive and the dissemination of its collection

The cycle Archives of Knowledge: Science, History and Memory (Arquivos do Saber: Ciência, História e Memória), organised by FCT, has been running since February this year, with the aim of disseminating the documentary collection of its Science and Technology Archive (Arquivo de Ciência e Tecnologia), as well as others relevant to the history and memory of Science and Technology in Portugal. The sessions are short and take place in an informal and sharing environment.

Image gallery

5ª sessão do ciclo Arquivos do Saber: Ciência, História e Memória, na FCCN

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Photos by Leonor Arrimar, FCT

Session video

Speakers and presentation

Ranking search results on Arquivo.pt on World Digital Preservation Day

November 7, 2025November 3, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Anotação de resultados de pesquisa no Arquivo.pt

Last updated on November 7th, 2025 at 03:55 pm

On World Digital Preservation Day, Arquivo.pt is promoting an online session dedicated to annotating search results on Arquivo.pt.

On World Digital Preservation Day, Arquivo.pt promoted an online session dedicated to annotating search results on Arquivo.pt, on 6 November, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.

The following topics were covered:

i) Access as a priority – text search as a search engine for the past
ii) How archived content is processed
iii) Annotations as quality assurance – demonstration

Importance of ranking results

The Arquivo.pt team has been reimplementing text search on Arquivo.pt, but needs to measure the quality of the new implementation by comparing it with the previous one. To do this, it is calling on the community for help.

How to rank results on Arquivo.pt

1. Acess to: https://anota.arquivo.pt

2. A random survey will appear (in Portuguese).

Example: “cavalo lusitano” “Associação Portuguesa do Cavalo Puro Sangue Lusitano” Entre 6 de agosto de 1991 e 1 de janeiro de 2010

3. Indicate the relevance of the result by selecting one of the buttons:

Annotation buttons: Very relevant, Partially relevant, Not relevant, Inaccessible content.

4. After finishing your annotation session, you should ‘Export’ (using the button for this purpose, which will download a file annotations.json).

5. Submit by clicking the ‘Enviar’ (Submit button and uploading the annotations.json file. Alternatively, you can send it by email to contacto@arquivo.pt.

Please refer to the guide (Guia de anotação de resultados de pesquisa) for a complete list of instructions.

Dataset on 2025 Portuguese Local Elections at Arquivo.pt

December 3, 2025November 3, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on December 3rd, 2025 at 12:56 pm

Local elections (“autárquicas”) were held in Portugal on 12 October 2025, and Arquivo.pt compiled a special collection of electoral content published on the web, resulting in 3.5 terabytes of information for research and academic work.

440 search terms were used to obtain 43,000 page addresses, along with the websites of parishes, municipalities, and political parties.

Here we explain the various steps involved in collecting data on the elections:

preparation of a list of search terms
search (using Google and the Google Rank Checker browser extension)
recording (using Heritrix and Browsertrix-crawler)
integration into Arquivo.pt
provision of data sets for research

How to identify election-related content on the web

To identify content related to the elections, we used a list of search terms, for example, “eleições autárquicas 2025″, “habitação autárquicas 2025″, “promessas “autárquicas 2025”. After the elections, other terms were added, such as “vitória autárquicas 2025”, “resultados autárquicas 2025”.

The search terms are words that aim to include various topics related to the elections, such as politics, society, economics, among others, media, candidate names, and regions of the country.

In the collection on local elections, the Google search engine was used to perform each search. Some advanced search parameters were used: number of results (&num=100), news results (&tbm=nws), image results (&udm=2). After the elections, the results were restricted using the “last week” filter.

In each search, the addresses of the search engine results pages (SERP) were extracted using the Google Rank Checker,Keyword SERP Ranking Tool. This tool works as a browser extension that exports the list of results in JSON format.

In total, 1,400 searches or queries were performed on Google (800 before the elections and 600 after the elections). Finally, the results of all searches (.json files) were compiled into a document and converted into a table. Each result contains various data, such as relevance, the domain from which it was extracted, the link or URL, the title of the publication, the date of the search, and the query.

It should be noted that the list obtained represents only a small portion of everything published on the Web about the elections. In addition, the same list contains results unrelated to the purpose of the collection (false positives) and some repetitions. To save time, no lines were deleted.

This exercise resulted in 45,000 pages (seeds) with news, articles, and publications related to the elections to be used in the collection process by Arquivo.pt. This dataset, 2025 Local Elections, is available on the open data platform Dados.Gov.

A list of parish councils, municipal councils and political parties with their respective websites has also been added.

How the contents were recorded and limitations to be taken into account

The addresses obtained before and after the elections were recorded in two web crawlers, Heritrix and Browsertix-crawler . These tools record pages from a given starting address (seed), then follow the links there, up to a certain limit, in this case a maximum of five times (five hops).

Heritrix was used for an initial generic collection of pages, as it is capable of quickly processing lists containing thousands of addresses: 25,858 URLs before the elections and 17,258 URLs after the elections. It generated 541 gigabytes of information.

The Browsertix-crawler was used to improve the collection of dynamic content. This crawler’s recording is browser-based. Recording takes longer, but captures content that would otherwise escape collection.

The collection was carried out using the Browsertix-crawler, in stages, first by recording the parish websites in August and September, and then, between October 9 and November 5, by recording news about the elections and 8,850 social media posts. It generated 2.9 terabytes of information.

As for the limits of the collection, we were able to identify a few: access blocked by some websites that defend themselves against automatic access, despite the Arquivo.pt agent being identified; social media content behind a login that cannot be reproduced on Arquivo.pt; videos that cannot be reproduced due to their format.

How and when to access data for research and work creation

EAWP48 is the identifying name of the collection that will bring together content on the Local Elections of 12 October 2025. It is described in the list of collections at Arquivo.pt.

Nos próximos meses, o conteúdo será indexado e os índices CDXJ ficarão disponíveis para os investigadores na lista de datasets do Arquivo.pt.

In the coming months, the content will be indexed and the CDXJ indexes will be available to researchers in the Arquivo.pt dataset list.

After one year, the collected content will be accessible through the Arquivo.pt search engine. Anyone will then be able to search election pages by text or image.

For further information, please contact us.

Data collected on the 2025 Local Elections

Find out more about electoral recalls from previous years

2025 local elections have a special collection at Arquivo.pt

September 5, 2025September 5, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Local elections will be held in Portugal on 12 October 2025 (Eleições Autárquicas), and Arquivo.pt will launch a special collection of electoral content.

Whenever elections are held, websites and social media channels are created for electoral purposes, many of which are deactivated shortly afterwards.

Sometimes, publications made during the election campaign disappear and it is not possible for citizens to see them again or for researchers to use them for study and analysis.

Arquivo.pt invites you to archive pages about the local elections. It’s simple: copy and paste an address and archive it. Here:

Alternatively, send us the link and we will record it.

Meet the winners of the Arquivo.pt Award 2025!

October 6, 2025June 28, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on October 6th, 2025 at 10:32 am

The winners of the Arquivo.pt 2025 Award were announced by the Público newspaper, the official media partner, on 28 June 2025.

A total of 36 entries were received and validated.

The award ceremony took place at the closing session of Encontro Ciência, at the NOVA School of Business and Economics (NOVA SBE) campus in Carcavelos, Lisbon, on July 11, 2025.

Start preparing your work for 2026 now!

The rules for the 9th edition of the Arquivo.pt Award were published in the Diário da República on 29 September 2025. Further information will be published shortly. The form for submitting works will be available in the first week of January and will close on 6 May 2026.

See the previous winners and compete with an innovative work.

1º place – “Minha Região – O Teu Portal Autárquico”

The winner of the 10,000 euro prize was the work ‘Minha Região – O Teu Portal Autárquico’ developed by Rúben Almeida, Ricardo Campos and Sérgio Nunes.

The result of this work is a platform available on the web that gathers municipal electoral information between 1976 and 2021. Through the minharegiao.pt website, anyone can find information by district, municipality and parish.

For example, a search for the Braga district shows the rise in the number of voters over time. It also shows that 2013 was the year with the highest abstention rate.

News:

2nd place – “Memor.pt – Explore a Memória Digital Portuguesa”

The 2nd prize of 3,000 euros was awarded to the work ‘Memor.pt – Explore Portugal’s Digital Memory’, by Joaquim Matoso.

Memor.pt is an interactive platform that uses content preserved by Arquivo.pt to make Portugal’s digital memory accessible. Through a conversational AI, a themed quiz and a daily article, users can explore thousands of archived pages on topics such as housing, democracy, culture and the labour market.

For example, if you choose to ‘play’, you’ll have a choice of five topics to test your knowledge with a quiz. So, what year was the new Democratic Constitution approved after 25 April?

3rd place – “Narrative Monitoring”

The third prize of 2,000 euros was awarded to the work ‘Narrative Monitoring: Analysis of conspiracy theories of population replacement’, developed by Erik Bran Marino, Rafael Prezado, Ana Sofia Ribeiro, Renata Vieira.

The work ‘Narrative Monitoring’ is a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the emergence and evolution of conspiracy theories of population replacement (PRCT, Comparative analysis of conspiracy theories in Europe), in the Portuguese digital space, between 1996 and 2021. Using Arquivo.pt as a primary source, it develops a methodology that combines web archiving techniques, natural language processing and statistical analysis to identify, classify and analyse 36,621 documents related to migration and demographic issues.

The website www.narrativemonitor.uevora.pt presents the results through interactive visualisations, a dynamic timeline and an educational quiz on the keywords most associated with conspiratorial discourse. For example, ‘Multicultural’, ‘Kalergi Plan’, ‘Refugee’. Which of these keywords is most associated with conspiratorial population content?

Honorable mention AMCC – Aveiro Media Competence Center: “Estudos Arquivados”

The Aveiro Media Competence Centre (AMCC) has awarded its Honourable Mention to the work ‘Estudos Arquivados’, by Filipe Oliveira João and Paulo Cabrita.

‘Estudos Arquivados’ is a platform that uses Arquivo.pt for pedagogical and teaching purposes. It organises a user’s searches by subject and school year, and users can register and save their own searches for later use. In contexts where schools use technology for teaching, ‘Estudos Arquivados’, being based on a public and open collection, aims to promote study and digital inclusion.

For example, a survey on the ‘25 de Abril’ for 8th grade students (high shcool) in the subject of History returns dated web pages preserved on Arquivo.pt, training students to use this new type of material.

Honorable mention .PT: “ArchiveChain”

The DNS.PT Association has awarded an Honourable Mention to . PT to the Professor who encouraged the submission of ‘ArchiveChain’. This work was developed as part of Bruno Cotrim’s Master’s dissertation in Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, with scientific guidance from professors Bernardo Ferreira (Faculty of Sciences) and Miguel Matos (Instituto Superior Técnico).

The concept is explained by its authors as follows: ‘ArchiveChain’ is a blockchain that democratises the mission of archiving the Portuguese historical web. In ArchiveChain, all citizens are invited to save pages from Arquivo.pt, and whoever saves the most pages receives the most rewards in the form of cryptocurrencies. At the same time, the pages saved by participants are used as ‘fuel’ in its internal workings, making it possible to implement smart contracts in a sustainable way and avoiding the massive energy consumption of other blockchains such as Bitcoin.

Start exploring the ArchiveChain platform and contribute to the better preservation of the Portuguese web.

News:

Honorable mention 25 de Abril e a Democracia: “Arquivo 25 de Abril”

The Comissão Comemorativa 50 anos 25 de Abril (Commemorative Commission for the 50th anniversary of 25 de Abril) awarded an Honourable Mention called ‘25 de Abril e a Democracia’ to the work ‘Arquivo 25 de Abril’, developed by Miguel Garcia.

The ‘‘Arquivo 25 de Abril’ website provides an online archive of journalistic articles about various personalities, events and movements that were relevant before and during 25 April 1974. For each of these elements, articles were collected from various leading media organisations, published online, taking this historical context into account.

For example, by choosing ‘artists’ related to 25 April, a user gets the name and a photo of singer Adriano Correia de Oliveira, the first in a list, and then related news published in the media and preserved by Arquivo.pt.

Imprensa

New at the Público newspaper, media partner (official annoucement of the winners)

Dissemination materials

Saber mais

Award cerimony at Ciência 2025 meeting

Video of the award cerimony (live streaming on Youtube)

Flash interviews

Image gallery

Vencedores do Prémio Arquivo.pt 2025

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RESAW 2025 conference had the participation of Arquivo.pt

June 12, 2025June 12, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Arquivo.pt was present at the 6th RESAW Conference for researchers in the Digital Humanities, Media and Communication and other areas, on the theme of ‘The Datafied Web’, which took place at the University of Siegen, Germany, from 4 to 6 June 2025.

RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) is an informal initiative that brings together researchers who use web archives in their research. RESAW’s first conference was in 2015, and it is now held every two years.

Initially, RESAW brought together European researchers, but now it brings together researchers from all over the world and has become a unique forum of its kind. In 2025, it had more than 100 participants. It brings together the best in the field of using web archives in research.

Niels Brügger, Professor of Media and Communication at Aaharus University in Denmark, has been its main driving force for 10 years.

Other leading researchers with studies on web archives are: Valerie Schafer from the University of Luxembourg, Jane Winters from the University of London, Anne Helmond from the University of Utrecht, Susan Aasman from the University of Groningen, Sophie Gebeil from Aix-Marseille University and Ian Millingan from the University of Waterloo.

This year’s theme “The Datafied Web” addressed the issue of the datification of the Web, from its beginnings in the 1990s to the present day, marked by massive data processing and the use of Artificial Intelligence.

Why would a web archive take part in an academic meeting?

Arquivo.pt has been a regular participant in RESAW since 2019, as it wants to make itself increasingly known as a service for national and international researchers.

Thanks to participation in international events such as RESAW, several publications have appeared that use and refer to Arquivo.pt. Any researcher with Internet access can search the information preserved on Arquivo.pt, use the APIs, process information or train their models.

We invite Portuguese researchers to take part in this meeting, as we have been the only Portuguese presence in several editions. We have an accessible web archive, ready to use, which is not the case in other countries. We would like to see researchers in the fields of Digital Humanities and Media and Communication in Portugal using Arquivo.pt more often and actively participating in meetings like RESAW.

Arquivo.pt’s contribution to RESAW 2025

Arquivo.pt contributed two presentations to the 2025 edition of the RESAW meeting, held at the University of Siegen. The first was about the Arquivo.pt APIs and their application in a research context, by Vasco Rato. The second was about the open datasets and lists of websites on topics and events that Arquivo.pt has prepared to help researchers start exploring archived information in greater depth.

Image gallery

RESAW 2025 na Universidade de Siegen

Portuguese Legislative Elections 2025 had a special collection by Arquivo.pt

May 28, 2025May 26, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on May 28th, 2025 at 09:04 am

Arquivo.pt carried out a special collection of content published online in connection with the Legislative Elections of 18 May 2025.

More than 8,000 unique pages were recorded, before and after the elections, resulting in around 250 Gigabytes of information.

This collection includes news items from the media, party websites and other citizen publications documenting this important event in Portuguese life.

The data collected is available for researchers to use in their work and projects.

Methodology for collecting the electoral event

The collection was carried out using a semi-automatic methodology that allows information to be identified and collected quickly and saves resources. The steps were as follows:

preparation of a list of search terms;
automatic search with the Bing Search API;
extraction of a list of page addresses or URLs;
recording (using Browsertrix-crawler);
integration into Arquivo.pt;
making the dataset available for research.

The starting point for identifying pages for this electoral event was a list of search terms, including words, names, dates, website addresses and also words in other languages. For example, we used ‘eleições’ “legislativas”, 2025, candidate names, party websites, newspaper websites and ‘eleições Portugal’ in other European languages to find foreign media pages that referred to the Portuguese elections. A total of 384 search terms were used.

The extracted addresses or URLs are then recorded, assuming that there are pages that miss the target and favouring speed, an important factor in this type of event.

A search was carried out to identify web pages before the elections and two the following week, with the corresponding recording, in order to add new content to the collection.

Finally, all the data from this special collection was published. Researchers are invited to use this information for projects or studies and to compete for the annual Arquivo.pt Award.

Legislative Elections 2025 data set

The dataset Legislative elections 2025: list of web pages with electoral content for preservation at Arquivo.pt was published at the open data Dados.gov.pt.

Find out more about electoral recalls from previous years

MOOC on Arquivo.pt and web archives launched and open to the community

May 21, 2025May 16, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on May 21st, 2025 at 11:42 am

The online training programme on Arquivo.pt, entitled The Web of the Past: Preservation and Research, has been launched and is open free of charge on the NAU platform to anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge of web archiving and Arquivo.pt services.

Daniel Gomes, manager of Arquivo.pt, who developed this training programme, announced it, at a first-hand, at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, during the workshop Digital preservation: tools as practices, held on May 7, 2025.

Registration open on the NAU platform for the MOOC web archiving

NAU – Sempre a Aprender is the e-learning platform of the FCCN, Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) digital services unit. The NAU initiative focuses on supporting the publication and dynamisation of content in the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) format in Portuguese.

The aim of this programme is to develop skills in searching the Web’s digital memory, with an emphasis on using Arquivo.pt both in everyday life and in the context of studies and research.

The programme is divided into four courses:

Preservação da web e arquivos (Preserving the web and archives)
Pesquisar e aceder ao passado com o Arquivo.pt (Search and access the past with Arquivo.pt)
Bem publicar para bem preservar (Publish well to preserve well)
Casos de uso do Arquivo.pt (Arquivo.pt use cases)

No special requirements are needed, apart from a computer with Internet access and a browser such as Google, Chrome, Internet Explorer.

Spread the word: arquivo.pt/mooc

Know more

Interview Internet Day, May 17, published on NAU website

Arquivo.pt at the University of Coimbra to talk about digital preservation

May 22, 2025May 10, 2025 by Ricardo Basílio

Last updated on May 22nd, 2025 at 06:45 pm

Arquivo.pt took part in the workshop entitled “Digital preservation: tools and practices”, promoted by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, on the afternoon of May 7, 2025. Moderated by Inês Santos, we highlight the initial panel with excellent speeches by Moisés Rockembach (University of Coimbra), Humberto Innarelli (Unicamp, Brazil) and Daniel Gomes (Arquivo.pt, digital service of FCCN-FCT).

The aim of the meeting was to offer the community a critical reflection on new trends in digital preservation tools and practices.

Digital preservation is a cross-cutting issue for organizations, as they all produce and generate information in digital format. There is a growing range of tools and solutions that promise greater efficiency in information processing. Many are labeled Artificial Intelligence. Such an abundance of products and frameworks calls for greater discussion and a critical approach. And this was achieved brilliantly by the panel of speakers.

Three approaches to Artificial Intelligence and Digital Preservation

This meeting brought together three authors of works on digital preservation at the Amphitheatre III of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra and discussed different approaches.

Moisés Rockembach, co-author with Caterina Pavão of Arquivamento da Web e preservação digital (Archiving the Web and Digital Preservation), the first work in Portuguese on web archives, focused his presentation on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on digital preservation systems, namely on searching for and accessing information, in classification and indexing processes, for example. With regard to the impact of the new tools that digital technology offers us, he referred to a phrase by Demi Gretscko: “The process of searching for and capturing information described in the text could certainly be improved in the future, especially when considering the contribution of new tools, such as those of Artificial Intelligence”.

There are Artificial Intelligence tools that allow interesting access to information through novelty and format. Archiving must take this reality into account and test the extent to which it can transform the way in which many types of content are disseminated and accessed. One example to illustrate this idea was the presentation of a Podcast generated by Artificial Intelligence from An example to illustrate this idea was the presentation of a Podcast generated by Artificial Intelligence, based on chapter 2 of the book on Web Archives, which deals with digital preservation policies.

Link to Podcast generated by Artificial Intelligence (published on Instagram, in Portuguese)

Humberto Innarelli, author of Criptex da preservação digital (Digital preservation cryptex), coordinator of the Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth (AEL) and specialist archival researcher at Unicamp, São Paulo and PhD professor at the Paula Souza Centre, São Paulo, posed the question of the future of digital preservation. Until now, the practice for preserving dynamic digital content has been to convert it into static documents. On the other hand, information is increasingly given to us dynamically, from databases or algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. What’s the next step? Archival practice needs to look not only at metadata, as it has done in recent years, but also at what explains how the information was generated (what we might call paradata). This is the only way to put archives and digital preservation in the long-term perspective. A hundred or two hundred years from now we should still be able to access the digital information produced today.

Daniel Gomes, editor of the book The Past Web and founder of Arquivo.pt, discussed the issue of Artificial Intelligence as it relates to non-artificial, human-produced content. What added value do tools that generate text, images, audio or video bring? If we consider, for example, that a Podcast on digital preservation used a book written by a human author as its basis, what new knowledge did it generate? Little or none. So, what has come to be called Artificial Intelligence can be considered a way of presenting human knowledge and in no way exempts humanity from continuing to think, research and produce new knowledge.

Arquivo.pt preserves content that has been published by individuals and organizations and in this sense is a unique source of its kind. Information published on the web is important for reporting and better understanding recent history, since the 1990s. Any Artificial Intelligence tool will have to go back to the point where the information was created by people. The human origin of the content preserved by Arquivo.pt, and the same can be said of traditional archives, makes them of enormous value, even considering their economic value. How much is the information stored in a web archive worth?

New MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) about web archiving

Daniel Gomes, Manager of Arquivo.pt, has announced first-hand the online course on the NAU platform: The Web of the Past: Preservation and Research (in Portuguese).

The online course or MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) is available for those who want to deepen their knowledge of web preservation.

The short link for dissemination is arquivo.pt/mooc

Preserved Arquivo.pt data and its automatic processing by APIs

Vasco Rato, developer of Arquivo.pt, showed how the automatic processing interfaces, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), work.

Arquivo.pt data can be processed by Artificial Intelligence. The works competing for the Arquivo.pt Award have already demonstrated this, as have projects such as GlórIA, a Large Language Model developed at NOVA-FCT.

Finally, Ricardo Basílio, digital curator, showed how anyone can save a page or an entire website on their own computer in a standardized format, compatible with web archives. ArchiveWeb.page and browsertrix-crawler were used for this, as training tools. This practice allows the community to be increasingly active in preserving institutional information published on the Web.

Agenda

14h30 Panel – Moderator: Inês Santos, University of Coimbra

Digital Preservation and Artificial Intelligence – Moisés Rockembach, University of Coimbra – Slides
Cryptex for Digital Preservation: The Next Step – Humberto Innarelli, Unicamp – Slides
Arquivo.pt and Web Preservation – Daniel Gomes, FCCN-FCT – Slides

16h00 Break

Open Data for Research. Automatic information processing through APIs – Vasco Rato, FCCN-FCT – Slides
Demo – Archiving the Web: do-it-yourself – Ricardo Basílio, FCCN-FCT – Slides
- Manual recording demo with ArchiveWeb.page
- Automatic recording demo with Browsertrix-crawler

17h00 – Final