Arquivo.pt in Coimbra at scientific computing event Jornadas FCCN 2025

Last updated on May 17th, 2025 at 12:52 pm

The Arquivo.pt team was in Coimbra between 6 and 8 May, at Jornadas FCCN to promote the preservation of the Portuguese Internet, as dissemination and promotion are an important part of its mission.

The Jornadas FCCN event is the responsibility of FCT’s digital services and annually brings together hundreds of participants from higher education institutions and other entities linked to science and technology.

On Tuesday morning, Pedro Gomes presented the highlights of the FCCN Zapping session and in the afternoon, from 4.30pm to 6pm, there was the Arquivo.pt session, Hands on for archiving the Web.

On Wednesday 7th, at 2.30pm, the Arquivo.pt team went to the University of Coimbra to take part in a meeting organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FCUL) entitled Digital preservation: tools and practices (Amphitheatre III, Floor 4).

Late on Wednesday afternoon, Daniel Gomes took part in the session Democratising AI: making Artificial Intelligence accessible to all on the contribution of Arquivo.pt to LLM AMÁLIA.

Arquivo.pt highlights at FCCN’s Zapping session

Pedro Gomes, who is in charge of Arquivo.pt’s collections, showed the oldest image archived on Arquivo.pt, which is on the old University of Coimbra website. He emphasised the new functionality that allows Flash content to be played, the statistical data of the Arquivo.pt, prizes, and the data sets.

Hands-on web archiving

This session, led by Ricardo Basílio, digital curator at Arquivo.pt, showed how to save web pages in standardised format using your own computer.

We believe that a ‘do-it-yourself!’ training is part of Arquivo.pt’s mission to promote the preservation of the Internet. By showing how website recording works, we’re also strengthening the community’s connection to Arquivo.pt.

For those who need to save high-quality copies of websites, this session will help. Participants were challenged to record static pages and others with interactive content, videos and social networks. Based on the questions that arose during the practical exercises, we clarified doubts and showed that archiving web content is very easy.

We used the ArchiveWeb.page extension, a tool from Webercorder.net, which the participants could obtain free of charge and install on their own computers.

If you are a computer scientist or advanced IT user

For those who expect and need to save entire websites automatically, we’ll briefly mention Browsertrix-crawler, an advanced tool that runs on a Docker, on Linux. Computer scientists and advanced IT users are all invited to try their hand at recording and archiving websites.

The demonstrations and exercises we propose using ArchiveWeb.page or Browsertrix-crawler also apply to advanced use cases and respond to organizations’ day-to-day web archiving needs.

Materials for the “hands-on” session

Democratising AI: making Artificial Intelligence accessible to everyone

On the second day of the FCCN Conference, 8 May 2025, in the session dedicated to Artificial Intelligence, Daniel Gomes, from FCNN-FCT, and João Magalhães, from NOVA-FCT, presented “AMÁLIA: Automatic Multimodal Language Assistant with AI”.

Daniel Gomes explained how Arquivo.pt is used for large-scale processing, specifically through the Arquivo.pt Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

APIs allow researchers to access information from Arquivo.pt automatically and develop various applications in research projects. For example, projects such as Conta-me Histórias, the Portuguese language model GlórIA LLM and, currently, AMÁLIA LLM have used APIs.