The session held during the Jornadas FCCN 2024 was entitled “Arquivo.pt at the service of culture” and aimed to highlight two of Arquivo.pt’s collaborations in the field of culture and knowledge, namely with Wikipedia Portugal and the Virtual Museum of Tourism (MUVITUR).
At the FCCN Zapping session, Arquivo.pt presented the Arquivo404 service, which allows websites to offer historical content instead of the negative “Page not found”.
The post-Day Workshop, promoted by ARDITI, was open to regional institutions and citizens in general. It was entitled “Arquivo.pt and the preservation of Internet memory”.
The contents were structured according to the training program run by Arquivo.pt and preceded by a framework between the other services of the FCCN – FCCN – Computação Científica da FCT.
Just as important as the content was the dialog that was established during the sessions between the participants and the Arquivo.pt team to clarify doubts or ask questions.
Web preservation is increasingly important for organizations that want to preserve part of their institutional memory and develop security policies.
ARDITI gave an important signal about preserving the web memory of Madeiran institutions by hosting and promoting the Arquivo.pt training sessions.
If you want to promote the preservation of web content in your organization, check out the Arquivo.pt training and contact us.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), covers various areas of knowledge, such as linguistics and computing, and is present in the new technologies used by citizens on a daily basis.
For example, when we search for information on the Internet and the computer generates an amazingly accurate response, in a language very close to our own.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is what allows machines to perfect the algorithm that generates these answers tailored to Internet users.
The problem is that natural language processing models have been developed more for the English language and less for Portuguese and other languages with less representation.
The more the processing models are trained on a language, the better they will be able to interpret the complexities of the language. But this is only possible if quality data is available.
Portuguese text collection on Arquivo.pt available for research
Arquivo.pt appears here as the largest Portuguese-language textual dataset in Portugal, available in open access, for researchers to train NLP models.
In recent years, researchers from various research groups and projects have drawn attention to the usefulness of preserved web data for large-scale processing.
Arquivo.pt has more than 1 Petabyte of preserved web content dating back to the 1990s, including everything that can be found on web pages. It’s not just text, but also images, audio files, video, page code and various metadata.
The content is accessible via the search interface and the Arquivo.pt APIs.
One of the projects that used Arquivo.pt to obtain large amounts of text is called GlórIA and is a large-scale language model (LLM) focused on the European Portuguese language.
Arquivo.pt, Portugal’s national web preservation service, has earned a prominent position by being named one of the top 3 government services in the 2023 Portugal Digital Awards. This recognition is testimony to the crucial role played by Arquivo.pt in the preservation and accessibility of Portugal’s digital heritage.
The three finalists in the category Best Government Project (best digital transformation project in the public administration sector) were Arquivo.pt, the Porto Digital Association and Banco de Portugal, which received the winning award.
Mission and recognition
Arquivo.pt, developed by the FCCN – National Scientific Computing , stands out as an innovative initiative in the field of digital preservation. Its mission is to collect and archive web content, allowing users to access past versions of web pages, documents and other online resources.
The recognition at the Portugal Digital Awards highlights not only the importance of digital preservation, but also the effectiveness and relevance of Arquivo.pt as a government service. By providing a journey through time via the Internet, this resource becomes a valuable tool for researchers, academics and the general public.
Commitment to digital preservation
Participation in the award underlines Arquivo.pt’s commitment to improving the historical record of the evolution of the Web in Portugal. This service not only contributes to the country’s digital memory, but also facilitates research, promoting understanding of digital evolution over time.
In addition, Arquivo.pt’s distinction reflects FCCN’s ongoing effort to develop and improve innovative services that benefit society. Digital preservation is a crucial component in ensuring that Portugal’s digital heritage is passed on to future generations, and Arquivo.pt fulfills this role in a unique way.
In conclusion, recognition in the Portugal Digital Awards 2023, a competition that received over 300 candidate services, solidifies Arquivo.pt’s position as one of the leading government services at the forefront of digital preservation. This achievement highlights the growing importance of digital preservation in the digital age in which we live.
The collection of 1 PetaByte of content predominantly in Portuguese, accessible to both researchers and ordinary citizens, is a milestone that deserves to be celebrated, in the month of its 16th anniversary.
At Arquivo.pt you can search for information published on the Web in the past, such as:
Arquivo.pt was created on November 8, 2007 with the aim of preserving content from the Portuguese Web.
In 2013, as a service operated by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), its mission was formulated as follows: “To promote the preservation of content available on the national Internet, ensuring that it is made available to the scientific community and the general public” (Decreto-Lei no. 55/2013).
In recent years, Arquivo.pt has created new services, such as CitationSaver, which allows researchers to record references to web content in their scientific articles, Memorial and Complete page, which facilitate access to content scattered throughout the huge 1 PetaByte block of data.
Where did so much information come from?
In order to reach the 1 PetaByte volume, Arquivo.pt periodically recorded content from websites in the .PT domain and from Portuguese websites in other domains.
In addition, frequent daily and monthly collections were made from a small number of government sites and the main news sites in Portugal.
As part of international collaborations, content was collected from sites in various languages, for example on the 2019 European Elections.
Content prior to 2008 came from the Internet Archive and donations, such as a collection made by the National Library and INESC on the 2005 Legislative Elections.
The largest Portuguese-language dataset available to researchers
By making 1 PetaByte of information available, in open access and through the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), Arquivo.pt is a useful tool for research.
For example, a researcher who wants to do a study on elections in Portugal can use the entire Arquivo.pt collection. Better still, they can focus on just a few special collections dedicated to the elections, choosing the ones that interest them and downloading just a few Terabytes to process automatically with the APIs.
Contributions from the various teams and friends of Arquivo.pt
The new release of Arquivo.pt named Helios was launched on November 13, 2023 and includes developments in Arquivo404 and CitationSaver.
Arquivo404 with new methods for defining time intervals
Arquivo404 is a service that presents website users with links to web-archived versions, instead of laconic “Page not found” error messages.
However, sometimes it is necessary to specify the correct version of a web-archived page to be displayed. For example, a website’s domain may have belonged to another entity in the past, and only web-archived versions since the website came under its current owners should to be displayed.
setMinimumDate( minDate : Date ) – specifies the earliest date of the web-archived version of the URL that can be displayed.
setMaximumDate( maxDate : Date ) – specifies the latest date of the web-archived version of the URL that can be displayed.
setMostRelevantMemento( criterion : ‘oldest’ | ‘most-recent’ ) – specifies the order of results for the versions retrieved from the web archive. By default, the oldest version is displayed ( ‘oldest’ ).
In short, Arquivo404 now allows you to define whether to display the oldest or most recent web-archived page to the users, within a certain time interval.
CitationSaver processes HTML documents
CitationSaver is a service that extracts citations in documents to online resources and archives them. This service is particularly useful for maintaining the integrity of scientific articles and the reproducibility of the experiments and studies described in them.
Many open-access articles are published in hypertext format (HMTL). CitationSaver now processes documents in HTML format, in addition to PDF and TXT formats.
For example, if a user finds an article on the Web which contains citations to online resources, he/she simply needs to submit the URL of the article into CitationSaver. The URLs cited in the article will be extracted and their content will be web-archived for later access.
The event, which took place in the auditorium of the Polícia Judiciária in Lisbon, was attended by representatives from the government’s justice department and professionals from the archives, communications and IT departments.
How to use Arquivo.pt to preserve institutional websites
Arquivo.pt took part in the presentation “Preserve your website”, which addressed the issue of preserving institutional websites and critical aspects such as cybersecurity.
Justice entities can benefit from Arquivo.pt and its various services to ensure good preservation of their websites, mitigate cybersecurity threats and provide historical content to citizens.
The presentation concluded with the following recommendations:
Inventory and publicize your current and historical websites
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!
Arquivo.pt preserved online documents in several languages about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections
The 2019 European Parliamentary Elections were an event of international relevance. The strategy to preserve the relevant information on the World Wide Web is delegated to national institutions. However, the preservation of web pages that document transnational events is not officially assigned.
The Arquivo.pt team, with the aim of preserving the cross-lingual online content that documents this event, applied a combination of human and automatic selection processes.
In the first step, 40 relevant terms in Portuguese about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections were identified, and then, automatically translated into the 24 official languages of the European Union: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
These translations were reviewed in collaboration with the Publications Office of the European Union. Besides that, in parallel, a collaborative list was launched to gather contributions of relevant seeds from the international community.
In the second step, the Arquivo.pt team iteratively ran 6 crawls (99 million web files, 4.8 TB) using different configurations and crawling software, to maximize the quality of the collected content.
The obtained web-data was aggregated into one special collection identified as EAWP23 and became searchable and accessible through Arquivo.pt in July 2020 (https://arquivo.pt/ee2019).
CLEOPATRA project: Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics Research Academy
Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event
The CLEOPATRA ITN was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network aimed to generate ways to better understand the massive digital coverage of major events in Europe over the past decades.
The main goal was to facilitate advanced cross-lingual processing of textual and visual information related to key contemporary events at large scale and develop innovative methods for efficient access and interaction with multilingual information.
In total, 14 Early-Stage Researchers hosted across 9 European Universities developed their research while enrolled as Ph.D. students.
Associated partners such as Arquivo.pt contributed to CLEOPATRA by hosting and training early-stage researchers such as Diego Alves. As part of the training program, he conducted a secondment at Arquivo.pt in Lisbon from June to August 2022.
The idea was to develop part of his research about syntactic structures of EU languages using the textual resources preserved by the Arquivo.pt and exchange knowledge with the web-archiving experts on the strategies to extract and process historical web-data.
Generating textual datasets for Natural Language Processing
Diego Alves’ work originated cross-lingual datasets about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections precious for research.
This work will be detailed in chapter “Robustness of Corpus-based Typological Strategies for Dependency Parsing” of the open-access CLEOPATRA book entitled “Event Analytics across Languages and Communities”.
A 3-step Natural Language Processing pipeline was developed to generate research textual datasets that can be used in several types of digital humanities studies:
Extract text: The textual content was extracted from each web-archived URL using the newspaper3k Python library. The language of each extracted text was determined using the langdetect library, to separate the texts written in different languages across distinct files;
Clean extracted texts: a Python script was applied to clean the texts by removing unnecessary information (e.g.: repeated instances, empty lines, etc.);
Double-check of language identification: the language of each cleaned extracted text was verified again to eliminate possible errors originated during the previous steps.
Two new research datasets are openly available!
The result was a dataset of cleaned and language-verified texts publicly available. Each file contains the texts in a given language about the 2019 European Union Elections. The distribution of extracted texts for each language is described in the figure below:
Number of tokens of each corpus extracted from the collection 2019 European Union Elections preserved by Arquivo.pt (EAWP23).
The aforementioned corpus was automatically annotated regarding part-of-speech and dependency relations to generate a corpus with syntactic information which is useful for linguistic studies.
The texts in these annotated corpora followed the same order of the respective raw-texts files. Each sentence is annotated following the Universal Dependencies framework in the CoNNL-U format, which is the reference in terms of syntactic annotation in Natural Language Processing. Thus, each file in this dataset contains the annotated texts in a given language about the 2019 European Union Elections
