To promote the use of the Arquivo.pt in the context of teaching, research or professional usage, three partners institutions promoted honorable mentions with an associated prize.
The Público newspaper will award an Honorable Mention to works based on the Público online content preserved by Arquivo.pt.
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.
Association DNS.PT will award an Honorable Mention to a professor or teacher who has encouraged the submission of works.
Share and spread the word!
Help us spreading the word about the Arquivo.pt Award 2024 among potential candidates!
More than 100 historical websites from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL) are now accessible through the Memorial service of Arquivo.pt.
FCUL’s IT Department sent to Arquivo.pt a list of old websites hosted on its servers that were no longer updated, but whose historical content continues to be interesting to the community (e.g. websites of research projects or scientific events).
Arquivo.pt preserved these websites in collaboration with their ownersa, seeking to maintain a faithful representation of the published content for the future.
FCUL redirected the domain of each website to Arquivo.pt, and then, became able to disconnect the respective servers and begin sparing the resources spent on their maintenance (e.g. electricity, data center space, human resources).
The MiNEMA scientific program website was the first that FCUL integrated into the Memorial. This website stopped being updated in 2009 when the project ended. FCUL invested resources in maintaining the website for another 10 years until it became necessary to suspend it down for cybersecurity reasons.
The Memorial of Arquivo.pt emerged as an option and since 2020, FCUL just needs to maintain the domain www.minema.di.fc.ul.pt while Arquivo.pt preserveS the information contained on the website.
Follow FCUL and preserve your historical websites in the Memorial!
An increasing number of institutions are recurring to the Memorial of Arquivo.pt to safely preserve the content of their historical websites. For example, FCUL preserved 116 websites, the Government IT Network Management Center preserved 23 and the Foundation for Science and Technology preserved 40.
Public institutions have priority to benefit from this service. However, other entities can also request it as long as they own the website domain.
Identify your historical websites candidate to be integrated into the Memorial of Arquivo.pt and contact us!
Some web-archived pages are reproduced incompletely due to problems occurred during the archiving process (e.g. deformatted or missing embedded images).
Complete page is a function of Arquivo.pt that allows to recover missing elements in web-archived pages, from other web archives or the original websites.
When a user views a page archived in Arquivo.pt, just needs to access the Options menu in the top right corner and choose Complete page.
This process is performed automatically.
How does Complete page work?
If you open a web-archived page that appears incomplete, try the Complete page option and wait.
Arquivo.pt will search for missing elements on the Internet and in other web archives using the Memento protocol. If it succeeds, the obtained elements will be immediately displayed on the web-archived page.
Later, these recovered elements are integrated into the Arquivo.pt collection, so that the web-archived page will appear more complete in the future accesses performed by any user.
Completing the home page of artist Cristina Guerra’s website found a missing image.
For example, the website of artist Cristina Guerra archived in 2005 had a missing image. By using Complete page, it was possible in 2021 to obtain this missing image from another web archive which preserved it.
Participate in collaborative curation to improve the quality of Arquivo.pt!
Due to the high number of web-archived pages, it is not possible for Arquivo.pt to complete them all automatically. Therefore, the collaboration of users to identify important pages with missing elements and try to complete them is important.
By using Complete page, the users are contributing to improve the quality of the historical webpages preserved in Arquivo.pt!
Always give it a try to complete web-archived pages may that look incomplete. If you detect any problem, contact us.
Spread the word about the Arquivo.pt Complete page!
The winner of the 10 000 euro prize was the work “Viajar no tempo sobre carris” (Travelling through time on rails) developed by Antero Pires, Carlos Cipriano, Diogo Ferreira Nunes and Ruben Martins.
“Viajar no tempo sobre carris” is an online platform that analyses and presents the evolution of train travel times in Portugal, based on timetables preserved in Arquivo.pt.
For example, it allows you to see the duration of the journey Lisbon-Oporto on the Alfa Pendular since the year 2000.
This work resulted in the website Existo that provides information on Portuguese artists, referring to the web pages in which they were mentioned over time. The work is based on an analysis of their representation and visibility that allows several readings.
For example, we can find information about the artist Joana Vasconcelos, news about other artists in a certain year or even get a graphic visualization of women artists compared to men.
The 3rd prize of 2 000 euros was awarded to the work “Memória Política”, (Political Memory) developed by Miguel Lopes, Maria Carneiro and João Andrade.
“Memória Política” is a Web application that processes and presents information taken from the web pages of political parties represented in the Portuguese Parliament, archived by Arquivo.pt.
For example, it allows you to search for the term “democracy” and obtain pages from the websites of the Parties related to the search. The results can be grouped by Party and by year.
The Público newspaper, official partner of the 6th edition of the Arquivo.pt Prize, awarded an Honourable Mention to the work “Fábrica do Jornal” (Newspaper factory), carried out by Miguel Almeida.
“Fábrica do Jornal” is a Web application that allows the user to generate a personalized newspaper from the news preserved at Arquivo.pt. The user can obtain a version that can be printed or saved in digital format.
The awards ceremony took place at the closing session of the Science 2023 Meeting, at the University of Aveiro, on 7 July 2023.
The awards were presented by the Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Elvira Fortunato, the President of the FCT Board of Directors, Madalena Alves and the Executive Director of the Aveiro Media Competence Centre, João Moraes Palmeiro.
On the following days, May 11 and 12, the IIPC Web Archiving Conference (IIPC WAC) was held, an initiative open to the community, where people or entities not associated with the IIPC and interested in the Web preservation domain can participate.
Contributions from the Arquivo.pt at the Web Archiving Conference
Arquivo.pt participated in the IIPC working group meetings (Training Working Group and Curators Working Group) and contributed with presentations in the thematic sessions Collaborations & Outreach and Program infrastructure (sessions 7 and 17).
Arquivo.pt contributed with presentations to the sessions Web Archive in Mediterranean area and its merge (4.A), From online Tools to Web Archive (6.B.), Towards a participatory approach to collections (9. A.), Digging up the materials for writing web history (9.B.).
How to research governmental web data? (abstract, slides)
Arquivo.pt has participated in three courses: Incentives design for hybrid multilingual information processing and analytics, in Southampton; National and transnational media coverage of European parliamentary elections, 2004-2014, London; and NLP for under-resourced languages, in Zagreb, Croatia.
In 2022, the Arquivo.pt welcomed two researchers in its facilities who used the archived resources and received special support from the Arquivo.pt team to develop their research.
The CLEOPATRA Project ended in 2023 with a meeting on the 16th May, in Hannover, which brought together Professors, Researchers and representatives of the institutions involved.
Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt’s Manager, highlighted the new tools that Arquivo.pt makes available and the results of the work carried out by the researchers that have passed through Arquivo.pt.
Secondments@Arquivo.pt and new research tools available (slides)
This event is a meeting for sharing knowledge among the entities that make up the national higher education and research community.
The event counts with the participation of decision-makers of the institutions, people in charge of computer technical services and people responsible for libraries and documentation services, among others.
Arquivo.pt presented two 90-minute sessions, on June 28th from 2h30 p.m. to 6 p.m., under the theme “Arquivo.pt services for managing citations and cybersecurity” and the service Arquivo.pt Memorial in the Zapping session.
Agenda
June 28 2:30-16 p.m.: Arquivo.pt:availableservicesandsystemarchitecture
The platform is maintained by the Celestino Domingues Library of The Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies (ESHTE) and has the participation of institutions from various areas of heritage that are content providers.
Among the digitized contents that can be consulted in the catalog and accessed in the provider institutions were sound, image, photography, printed material, but websites were missing.
Thus, the idea for the MUVITUR’s new “Web Pages” collection emerged.
Collaboration between MUVITUR and Arquivo.pt
In 2019, a collaboration between Arquivo.pt and MUVITUR began with the aim of identifying websites related to Tourism in Portugal and to disseminate the history of content published on the Web since 1996.
In 2022, a list was established with about 400 records of websites of various entities related to tourism, hotels, travel agencies, pages of municipalities’ websites dedicated to tourism and others.
Collection of records in the MUVITUR catalog with webpages preserved at Arquivo.pt.
How the integration was done
MUVITUR uses Nyron software, which allows content from different sources to be aggregated using the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interoperability protocol, which is very common among libraries, archives and museums to provide content to portals such as Europeana.
Arquivo.pt, however, does not make information available through OAI-PMH so it was necessary to find alternative ways to create a record in Nyron with descriptive information from preserved sites.
The procedure for integration was as follows:
The XML schema with the fields for the metadata, according to what works in Nyron, was exported to an Excel sheet.
The information was entered manually, respecting the format and syntax, in collaboration with the computer technicians.
The XML file with the inserted data was validated and imported into Nyron.
Creating records in catalogs is largely a manual task and requires human curation. However, it was possible to input information to be automatically processed in the records of the Website collection. For example, the thumbnail was obtained using the Arquivo.pt API, more specifically the linkToScreenShot, visible in the technical details of a preserved page (see the options menu on the top right of a replayed page).
For other elements, such as the site’s title, it would be possible to obtain them automatically through the Arquivo.pt API, however the quality of the information depends on what the site’s producers have inserted and may not be accurate. The dates to limit the temporal scope can also be obtained automatically, but the manual method was chosen to control the information presented.
In the continuation of the project, the collection will be increased with new records, as there are thousands of websites about the Tourism sector.
Description of Web contents in the MUVITUR catalog
In the collection “Paginas Web” the following data are used:
Denomination – usually the title of the website
Organization – the entity to which the publication belongs
Website address on the Internet
Address for version in Arquivo.pt
Moment(s) to remember
Link for miniature in Arquivo.pt
Descriptors
Geographical data (location, coordinates, geographical name)
The presentation of the information was adjusted to be aligned with that of other MUVITUR resources and contains links to Arquivo.pt.
For example, in the register of the Turismo do Algarve site, we find a link to a moment to remember in 2011 and another link to the history in Arquivo.pt under “Consultar objecto”.
Organizations can create collections of Websites from their area
The National Library of Australia, for example, included records of preserved Websites in its catalog. In the Library of Congress there are collections of old Websites alongside traditional resources.
However, websites are rarely included in museums.
With this unprecedented project we can say that preserved Web sites have gained citizenship in digital platforms dedicated to cultural heritage.
MUVITUR has paved the way with this project for other entities to create collections of websites of their interest on their own platforms.
Documents cite web content by referencing their URLs so that readers can later access them.
In the case of scientific articles, the importance of these citations is even greater to maintain the integrity of research works because they often reference essential information to enable the reproducibility of an experiment or analysis.
For example, links in a scientific article may cite the datasets, software or web news that supported the research, which are not included in the text of the article.
To respond to the need of preserving the integrity of documents, Arquivo.pt launched the CitationSaver.
CitationSaver automatically extracts cited links in a document and preserves their content (e.g. web pages cited in a book) so that they can be retrieved later from Arquivo.pt.
Use CitationSaver to preserve the integrity of your documents
Upload a document and CitationSaver will extract the cited URLs, archive their content and make it available on Arquivo.pt after a short notice. There are 3 methods to upload a document:
insert the address (URL) of the PDF or TXT file, if it is published online
upload the file in PDF or TXT format
paste the text containing the addresses you want to preserve (e.g. References section of an article or Bibliography of a book).
Organizations keep domains that referenced websites which are no longer used, to prevent them from being bought or because they were just forgotten.
The aim of project Renascer (Reborn) is to bring back historical websites whose content is no longer available online and whose domain continues to be held by their authors.
“Forgotten” domains can cause cybersecurity problems
In this situation, the original content of the website was inaccessible despite the fact that the domain continued to be owned by the author of the website.
Furthermore, since the domain was still pointing to an active web server, cybersecurity issues could occur if this server was not being properly maintained.
The domain owner only has to redirect it to Arquivo.pt, through the Memorial service.
For example, the mctes.pt domain started to reference back its original contents preserved by Arquivo.pt, thus making this website to be reborn.
Examples of Reborn domains
Project Renascer identified active domains managed by FCCN which were not referencing any content, and gave them a new life turning them to reference its historical contents preserved by Arquivo.pt.
Contact Arquivo.pt to reborn the historical websites of your organization.
Arquivo.pt is a free public service that allows searching and accessing Web pages preserved since the 1990’s, such as viewing an old news or accessing an old version of a website.
The collaboration between the AMCC and Arquivo.pt is materialized in a training program entitled Arquivo.pt: Digital Skills for the Media, developed in four webinars, and in the attribution of the AMCC Honorable Mention to work done on Portuguese centenary newspapers in the Arquivo.pt Award 2023.
Webinar cycle: Arquivo.pt: digital skills for media
The webinar cycle aims to equip trainees with digital skills that enable them to solve problems caused by the disappearance of digital information and gain competitive advantage in the production of unique and exclusive content.
Webinar 1: A tool for quickly searching the past
Data: Mars 24, 2023 Time: 14h00-15h30 (in Portuguese)
