This Webinar Cycle, dedicated to the preservation of cultural memory published on the Web, is a collaboration between APDSI and Arquivo.pt, FCCN digital services of the Foundation for Science and Technology I.P..
Program
Webinar 1 – March 20 – Arquivo.pt: a new tool for researching the past. Daniel Gomes, Head of Arquivo.pt – Vídeo
Webinar 2 – March 25 – To publish well, to preserve well. Pedro Gomes, Arquivo.pt Collections Manager – Vídeo
Webinar 3 – March 27 – Access and automatic processing of information preserved from the Web through APIs. Vasco Rato, Web developer
Webinar 4 – April 1 – Archiving the Web: do-it-yourself! Ricardo Basílio, Digital Curator
Professor José Borbinha, eArchiving workshop, 25 February 2025, at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon (José Tribolet Room)
Arquivo.pt took part in the eArchiving Portugal workshop, which was held at the Instituto Superior Técnico on 25 February 2025, at the invitation of Professor José Borbinha, one of the first people to do web archiving in Portugal when he worked at the Biblioteca Nacional in the 90’s.
Professor José Borbinha, better than anyone, knows how to tell in the first person the small, almost epic episodes, the actions of the first ‘heroes’ that led to the creation of a web archive in Portugal. He sees Arquivo.pt as an essential service when it comes to digital preservation and safeguarding organisations’ communication heritage.
The event had a hybrid format with 50 in-person and 270 online participants and was open to all public and private organisations concerned with digital preservation and information management in any type or format. This includes the content of websites and social networks!
eArchiving, a European initiative born in Portugal
The eArchiving Initiative‘s main objective is digital cultural heritage and was created at a meeting of European partners in Lisbon.
‘It was precisely in this room (the José Tribolet room at the Instituto Superior Técnico) that eArchiving began eleven years ago, on 29 May 2014,’ recalled José Borbinha (INESC-ID), host and organiser of the workshop.
Janet Anderson, manager of eArchiving, showed the progress made in eleven years in the field of digital preservation. The projects funded by the European Union within the consortium have resulted in the development of specifications, software, training and knowledge about digital preservation.
This was followed by a presentation of contributions to digital preservation in Portugal: DGLAB, by Pedro Penteado, Centro Hospitalar São João, by Fernanda Gonçalves, Ministério da Justiça, by Alexandra Lourenço and Cristina Soares, Arquivo.pt, by digital curator Ricardo Basílio.
Finnaly, Miguel Ferreira spoke on behalf of DLM Forum MTÜ , a community in which KEEP Solutions LDA participates by developing software. Taking a more technical approach, he showed how the metadata in the E-Ark packaging specifications is structured to fulfil the requirements of digital preservation.
How to use Arquivo.pt to preserve institutional websites
Digital preservation requires collaboration, both internally and externally between organisations, and this workshop served that purpose: sharing good practices, disseminating tools and services and connecting people.
Arquivo.pt highlighted three services from its catalogue for preserving content published on the web:
Arquivo.pt services can be used, for example, by municipalities to preserve content published on institutional websites.
Arquivo.pt training, such as webinars or face-to-face sessions, are useful for empowering organisations to take care of institutional content, including social media content that requires an alternative strategy.
Arquivo.pt launched a new version named Isis on 7 January 2025.
Support for Flash using the Ruffle emulator
This new release of Arquivo.pt enables the replay of web-archived animations and interactive content in Flash format!
Flash technology was used on websites in the early years of the Web.
However, it became obsolete and current browsers, such as Google or Edge, no longer support it, preventing the visualization of such content. Software emulation is a way of giving access to content produced by obsolete technologies.
Arquivo.pt has therefore included Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator that allows you to visualise Flash content that was previously inaccessible to the users.
Web-archived Flash animations preserved by Arquivo.pt: before and after
Access the following sites on Arquivo.pt, before and after using Ruffle, bearing in mind that they are generally designed to be used on a desktop computer.
The Público newspaper will award an Honorable Mention to works based on the Público online content preserved by Arquivo.pt. This award includes a two-year subscription to Público online.
The Aveiro Media Competence Center (AMCC) will award an Honorable Mention to the best work on the web archive of one or more Portuguese online media (500 €).
Association DNS.PT will award an Honorable Mention to a professor or teacher who has encouraged the submission of works.
The Comissão Comemorativa 50 Anos 25 de Abril will award an Honourable Mention accompanied by a prize of €5,000 to one of the works submitted that uses Arquivo.pt to deal with the theme ‘”25 de Abril and Democracy”.
The initiative has the high patronage of the President of the Portuguese Republic.
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Help us spreading the word about the Arquivo.pt Award 2024 among potential candidates!
Arquivo.pt was recognised in the ‘Promoting a more Innovative and Digital Society’ category.
This category highlights the innovative aspect of organisations’ digital transition.
The manager of Arquivo.pt, Daniel Gomes, and the web developer in charge of Arquivo.pt’s collections, Pedro Gomes, were present at the ceremony, which took place in Oeiras on 3 December 2024.
Daniel Gomes explains how a web preservation service contributes to a more sustainable information society, in a video prepared for the awards ceremony.
The Digital Transformation Award (4th edition in 2024) aims to ‘recognise and disseminate best practices in the adoption and implementation of information and communication technologies (ICT), with a view to a more digital society sustained by public and private institutions that are more efficient and closer to the citizen’ (APDSI website).
The 2024 edition of this award received 33 nominations in 3 categories:
Effectiveness/Efficiency of Organisations
Proximity to Citizens and a More Inclusive Society
The aim of this joint FCT team was precisely to bring about the meeting and sharing of experiences between various institutions that inevitably have to manage information, both in traditional formats such as paper and in digital formats.
The meeting had 243 participants and 29 speakers throughout the day. Nine of the twenty-seven presentations were submitted for a session called ‘Community Space’.
Digital information was the main theme of the speeches. At the opening, the Head of the DGLAB – Direção Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (Directorate for Books, Archives and Libraries), Silvestre Lacerda, recalled that the DGLAB was a pioneer among public organisations in tackling the issue of digital preservation. FCT vice-president Francisco Santos emphasised the economic value of data for scientific research.
Digital preservation is not just about technology, as Henrique São Mamede, Professor at Universidade Aberta, INESC TEC, said at the opening conference. It’s also about people, the human factor, the environment outside organisations and new sensibilities such as sustainability and ecology. Hence the importance of creating bridges, of using Artificial Intelligence, for example, in conjunction with ethics. Presentation.
Throughout the day, four panels brought together presentations on various preservation contexts such as the digitisation of sound, image and video, research data, regulatory frameworks, management systems for digitised or born-digital information, dissemination and access, and use in academic research.
Panel 1: Digital preservation initiatives and realities
The first panel was moderated by João Gomes, Director of Advanced Services at FCT, and brought to the table the diversity of contexts in which the issue of preservation and access arises. Here we highlight one aspect of each presentation and invite you to follow the links to learn more about these initiatives.
Moisés Rockemback, Professor at the University of Coimbra and co-author of the book Arquivamento da web e preservação digital (Web archiving and digital preservation), spoke about the first initiatives carried out in Brazil to preserve content published on the Web. The websites of the candidates in the Brazilian elections, for example, are ephemeral by nature but have become material for historiographical research by being preserved in a web archive. From a more theoretical perspective, he addressed the issue of memory. Preserving the web allows us to bring to light events that were only broadcast on digital media such as the web and, in this sense, postpones the end of history expressed in the metaphor of the ‘Dark Age’, a time of darkness, empty of information. Presentation.
Pedro Penteado, Director of Archival and Standardisation Services, presented a set of instruments that the DGLAB has developed, such as the Macro Estrutura Funcional (MEF) (Macro Functional Structure, the Avaliação Suprainstitucional da Informação Arquivística (ASIA) (Super-institutional Assessment of Archival Information) project and the Lista Consolidada na Plataforma CLAV (Consolidated List on the CLAV Platform), which allows the different public administration bodies to comply with legislation and standardise classification and assessment practices. He recalled that these tools are flexible to meet the specific needs of organisations. Presentation.
Pedro Príncipe, Head of the Documentation Services Division at the University of Minho, spoke about research data. The preservation of and access to data is fundamental to the production of science. To achieve this, it is necessary to combine initiatives and work in networks and create communities of practice. The GDI Forum is an example of how useful it is to meet professionals. Certification is highly recommended, as demonstrated by the University of Minho, which has certified its repository, as it is an extra reason to create robustness and to achieve the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) objectives. Presentation.
Hilário Lopes, RTP’s Deputy Director of Institutional Relations and Archive, described the path to digitalisation that has completely changed the way we access the RTP archive (Portuguese Radio and Televison). If until 2001 digitisation was done on request, from that year onwards the contents were massively digitised. Since 2007, the contents have been accessible in digital format, which has facilitated access and use. RTP Memória and Portal RTP are two examples of access to the audiovisual heritage of public radio and television. Presentation.
Panel 2: Preserving and reusing Web information
The theme of web archiving was highlighted in the second panel, moderated by Daniel Gomes, manager of Arquivo.pt and its initiator on 8 November 2007.
Ricardo Basílio, digital curator at Arquivo.pt, presented the online exhibition ‘Memories of 25 April on the Internet’, created in collaboration with the 50 Years of 25 April Commemorative Commission, based on preserved web pages. Select pages about the 25 April celebrations across the country were highlighted through a guided tour of the exhibition. Presentation.
António Campos and Hélder Mestre, from the Arquivo Municipal de Sines (Sines City Council Archive), showed how, since 2020, they have been preserving web content of local interest in collaboration with Arquivo.pt. They record web pages with ArchiveWeb.page, a Webrecorder tool, send a copy of the files to Arquivo.pt, transcribe images and videos verbatim, and also use PDF as the most traditional format for archiving news. The issue of accessibility to content for people with special needs is fundamental in the preservation process. Presentation.
Finally, Daniel Gomes emphasised how much has been done in the last 17 years in the field of web preservation, to the point where we now have a functional service that everyone can use. As a testimony to those early days, we found a page from Diário Digital newspaper from November 2006.
Panel 3: Preserving the present and safeguarding the future
The third panel was moderated by Paula Meireles, Coordinator of the Archive, Documentation and Information service at the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and brought four other realities to the table.
Filipe Guimarães Silva, Executive Director of the Fundação Mário Soares e Maria Barroso, and António Coelho, Digital Reproduction Coordinator, delved into the technical issues related to digitisation, based on the case of the collection, which is also accessible on the Casa Comum portal. Quality control is the most important factor in obtaining a preservable digital version. You don’t always need expensive technology to get good results. It is essential to follow standards and ensure that quality metadata is generated. Presentation.
Fernanda Gonçalves, Director of Archives at the São João Local Health Unit, showed how the São João Digital Clinical Repository is transforming access to clinical files with advantages in terms of both speed and quality of information. The information management model at this huge institution poses immense challenges for preservation and continued access, as it involves creating interoperability between multiple systems. What’s more, this is sensitive data with different levels of access. This is where the archive comes in as an asset. The archive service must rise to the challenges of any organisation in order to serve all its ‘clients’. Presentation.
Augusto Ribeiro, head of the Documentation and Information Management Service at UPdigital, University of Porto, explained how the university collection is being preserved. From the treatment of paper documents to their digitisation and inclusion in the digital repository, it’s important to guarantee their robustness. This work has been progressive and systematic, i.e. it follows a plan where all the pieces fit together as the work is carried out. Presentation.
Pedro Penteado (DGLAB) presented the ‘Digital Preservation Guide’ project that is being developed in collaboration with the Asociación Latinoamericana de Archivos (ALA). This initiative will structure content on digital preservation in a pragmatic way. Soon, professionals will have a knowledge base to consult whenever they carry out digital preservation activities. Presentation.
Panel 4: Community space
The fourth panel, moderated by Paula Carvalho, from FCT’s Science and Technology Archive, included 9 short presentations submitted by the community. Below, we present the abstracts submitted by the authors:
Justiça do Futuro: + Digital – Alexandra Lourenço, Albertina Catrola, Alexandra Henriques, António Dias, Cristina Ferreira, Inês Nunes, Rute Ramos | SGMJ
It was shown the work that the Commission has been doing to identify archives, documentation centres and collections of all kinds with material about 25 April. There are public collections that are practically unknown, and others that are in private collections. Inventorying and publicising them is therefore the first step in promoting study and knowledge about 25 de Abrril.
Finally, Maria Inácia Rezola announced the award of the Honourable Mention ‘25 de Abril and Democracy’, together with a prize of 5,000 euros, in the Arquivo.pt Award 2025, to the best work on 25 April that uses Arquivo.pt.
Image gallery
Encontro Dia Mundial da Preservação Digital 2024 #WDPD2024
Credits: photos by Leonor Arrimar (FCT). Included are some images of mobile devices sent in by participants.
Arquivo.pt won the award in the category of “Best Digital Project of Central Public Administration”.
This category annually recognizes a project that has contributed “unequivocally to the development of the Central Public sector through digital means, as well as the Digital Economy in Portugal”.
The Head of Arquivo.pt Daniel Gomes, the FCCN Deputy General Coordinator Salomé Branco and the FCT vice-president Francisco Santos were present at the ceremony held on October 24 at the Técnico Innovation Center in Lisbon and received the award.
Arquivo.pt receives Award for Best Governmental service
Navegantes XXI Awards
The Navegantes XXI (Navigators XXI) Awards are an annual initiative by ACEPI – Digital Economy Association, created with the mission “To Promote and Develop the Digital Economy in Portugal”.
The competition rewards the best of the Digital Economy and Society in Portugal in its most diverse aspects. It currently comprises 20 categories that reward the most innovative and digital transformation Portuguese projects, ideas and institutions. Three prizes are also awarded for special categories outside the competition.
The month of September marks the beginning of a year’s work and also the end of many websites that are hopelessly lost. Remodelled or shut down without making a good copy of their content, this is how historic websites are lost unnecessarily.
There are tools that allow websites to be saved immediately by the organisations that manage them. In addition, there is the on-demand archiving service for high-quality websites that Arquivo.pt provides to partner organisations or in occasional collaborations.
This article aims to highlight the Browsertrix Crawler used by Arquivo.pt, without excluding other tools, which can be useful to information managers and IT departments.
Use of Browsertrix-crawler by Arquivo.pt for high-quality collections
Browsertrix Crawler is a tool that lets you record entire websites and lists of web pages automatically and in a format compatible with web archives.
Arquivo.pt uses the Browsertrix Crawler to make high-quality site collections (RAQs) on-demand of the community. For example, when a site is about to be shut down, when it’s going to undergo remodelling or, periodically, to maintain a good history of a particular site.
Requests for high-quality collections (RAQs) to Arquivo.pt are increasingly frequent: 77 requests from January to September 2024. This is a sign that there is greater concern about the preservation of web content.
What you need to use Browsertrix-crawler locally
The group that developed the Browsertrix Crawler, Webrecorder.net, led by Ilya Kreymer, has the motto ‘web archiving for all’. Its tools make it possible to record the Internet in a decentralised way and on a small scale.
The Browsertrix Crawler is available and can be installed on your computer for small collections.
The basic version of Browsertrix that Arquivo.pt is using requires basic command line knowledge, which is the only barrier for non-experts.
From Arquivo.pt’s own experience, using the Browsertrix Crawler is easy in multidisciplinary teams, where there is always someone with minimal knowledge to use Linux commands and provide occasional support.
Demonstration of recording entire websites on your own computer
To promote the preservation of sites in Web archive format, Arquivo.pt presents a use case for the Browsertrix Crawler. It’s useful for anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge and practice of saving sites in a local environment.
Other tools used by Arquivo.pt to record content
Brozzler: a tool for improving the history of daily and monthly collection sites
Brozzler is a similar tool to Browsertrix Crawler in that it also bases its recording on a browser. It is used and maintained by the Internet Archive.
Arquivo.pt has been using Brozzler since at least 2018 to record web pages with interactive content present on the web pages and for high-quality collections (RAQs).
Lists of up to 200 sites are successfully recorded by Brozzler. For example, the 125 daily collection sites (FAWP) are recorded with Brozzler at the beginning of each month.During the month, another list of 75 monthly collection sites (MAWP) is recorded using Brozzler.
At the end of 2023, Arquivo.pt compared Brozzler and Browsertrix Crawler and chose to keep these two tools.
Heritrix, pywb and ArchiveWeb.page: tools for thousands of sites or one page
The Heritrix crawler is Arquivo.pt’s main recording tool. It is used on huge lists of websites, such as the .PT domain sites, to which other Portuguese sites are added, totalling more than half a million.
To complete the list of recording tools used by Arquivo.pt, mention should be made of pywb, which comes into play, for example, when an Arquivo.pt user uses the ‘Complete the page’ functionality or the ArchivePageNow service.
Arquivo.pt made special collections on the three elections that took place this year: the Parlamentary elections on 10 March, the elections in Madeira island on 26 May and the European elections on 9 June.
More than 70,000 pages with content related to the elections and political life in Portugal and Europe were identified and around 4 terabytes of information collected.
We would like to thank the people who contributed to the selection of pages. Teachers and students are encouraged to do work using the special collections on elections that Arquivo.pt has produced over the years.
Find out more about the collection procedure and the results obtained.
The Portuguese Parlamentary Elections took place on 10 March 2024 to elect the members of the Assembly of the Republic for the 16th Legislature of the Third Portuguese Republic.
We would like to highlight the community’s contribution to this collection with a manual selection of 827 pages, which helped to improve the quality of the collection.
Around 500 compound terms or keywords were used to search for content published on the web about the elections. The service used for the automatic search was the Bing Search API. The results were limited to the top 20.
For example, the compound term ‘head-to-head legislative 2024’ found pages relating to debates between candidates. The term ‘legislative housing 2024’ found pages relating to party proposals for housing. The term ‘legislativas 2024 site:expresso.pt’ identified Expresso pages about the elections. The names of the candidates were also used.
After the elections, search terms specific to that period were used, such as ‘legislative victory 2024’, ‘legislative defeat 2024’ or ‘legislative results 2024’, among others.
The automatic search in the Bing Search API resulted in 34,120 addresses obtained before the elections and 5,803 after the elections.
The websites of political parties, including parties without parliamentary seats, were also collected during the election period.
Not all the content identified could actually be recorded, due to the limitations of the recording tools or the restrictions of the websites themselves.
The recording took place between 6 and 20 March and resulted in 3.2 Terabytes of information. The contents have been included in the EAWP45 special collection and will be available after one year.
Collection ID: EAWP45 (where the recorded content is located, available after 1 year)
Madeira Legislative Assembly elections 2024
The elections for the Legislative Assembly of Madeira took place on 26 May. Arquivo.pt carried out a special collection of content published on the web.
We began by automatically searching for news, election pages and websites related to the elections in Madeira. We used a list of search terms to put into the Bing Search API.
The aim was to obtain as many URLs as possible related to the event or topic in question, i.e. the Madeiran elections. To do this, several limits were set for the results: top 10, top20, top50 and top100. This process was documented, which shows that the more we expand the number of results, the greater the number of pages that are not very relevant and sometimes outside the intended target.
All the addresses (12,656) were recorded on 7 June in the Heritrix crawler.
Collection ID: EAWP46 (where the recorded content is located, available after 1 year)
European elections 2024 in multilingual collection
The European elections took place on 9 June in Portugal. In some countries, such as Estonia, Czechia and Italy, the elections were held on a different date.
Arquivo.pt collected pages relating to the European Elections in the 27 countries of the European Union and in the 24 official languages.
A list of 40 compound terms or keywords was used and translated into the 24 official EU languages. The terms were translated into the various languages in 2019 by the EU Publications Office. This resulted in a multilingual list of 960 terms to put into the Bing Search API.
Before the elections, on 3 June, the first search was carried out, resulting in 8,986 unique addresses, limiting the number of results to the top 20.
After the elections, new search terms were added with the names of the main candidates for the European Parliament in each country of the European Union. This second post-election search yielded 15,371 unique addresses.
The tool used for this collection was Heritrix. The collection was limited to three ‘hops’. In this case, the crawler follows links up to three times. This means that we opted for a certain restraint in the depth of the recording. Three ‘hops’ in the Heritrix crawler is enough to record one page (in other applications also called ‘page’ or ‘single page’ recording).
The content was recorded between 7 and 20 June and included in the EAWP46 special collection. It will be available after 1 year.
Arquivo.pt has contributed to the international collection of web pages on the Summer Olympics Games taking place in Paris from 26 July to 11 August 2024 and is doing the same for the Summer Paralympics taking place from 28 August to 8 September.
The pages of this collection will also be available on Arquivo.pt for those who want to carry out studies on sport and Olympism.
How the pages about Portuguese athletes were selected
At the Olympic Games 73 athletes represented Portugal in 15 sports, and at the Paralympic Games 27 athletes in 10 sports.
The criterion for selecting pages for the international collection was news about the athletes. For each athlete, pages were selected about their expectations before the games, their performance in the competition and their comments during and after the competition.
Some athletes have more news selected than others, and the same goes for the sites from which the news comes. The selection of pages was not limited to the first results presented by the search engine. We looked for a variety of channels and news from regional and local sites, some from the region or city where the athletes came from.
More than 500 pages to remember the Portuguese presence in Paris
The contribution of Arquivo.pt, as you can see in the table, already has more than 500 web pages.
