In this 4th edition of the annual Arquivo.pt Award, € 15,000 will be awarded to the 3 best works (1st place: € 10,000).
The deadline for submissions is May 4, 2021.
Works may be developed individually or in group about any topic, as long as they use the information provided by Arquivo.pt as the main source of information.
The Público Newspaper is the official media partner of the Arquivo.pt Award in 2021. It was one of the first newspapers to become available online.
Jornal Público will award an Honorable Mention to one of the works which focused on the historical web-archive of Público online.
Preserving scientific project websites is important
The contents of the websites tend to disappear when the scientific projects are finished.
The preservation of scientific project websites is important because:
documents the development of projects;
ensures access to unique technical and scientific content that researchers have posted on the project websites (eg presentations, photographs, data sets);
reinforces the visibility of the results of projects financed by FCT.
Experimental collection of scientific projects websites in 2016
Arquivo.pt automatically collected websites for projects financed by FCT in 2016.
The information about these websites was dispersed as it was not recorded during the administrative process.
For about 20 years, FCT financed scientific projects, so the number of sites could be too high to be identified manually.
Then an automatic methodology for identifying these websites was developed, developed by Arquivo.pt.
The FCT database had a total of 11,996 project entries but did not include references to web addresses. Applying the automatic methodology, 7 956 URLs related to the funded scientific projects were identified.
The collection of content referenced by these addresses resulted in the preservation of 600 721 files (72 GB), including content such as research group web pages, researchers’ personal pages or project-related blogs.
Online references in scientific project reports have been preserved since 2020
From June 2020, the website addresses of the projects financed by FCT must be registered in the progress and final reports funded by FCT.
Arquivo.pt started using these addresses to preserve the contents of websites of national scientific projects in a systematic way.
1st official collection of scientific project websites
In June 2020, Arquivo.pt obtained 263 addresses related to 100 scientific projects from the reports submitted to FCT. Most of the addresses (67%) did not have any version previously preserved in Arquivo.pt.
The addresses obtained point to online resources such as the websites of the projects, R&D units, news in the media, articles in scientific journals or repositories, databases, videos on Youtube or Facebook pages.
In July 2020, a special collection was launched from this set of addresses which resulted in 6.9 GB of information obtained from the visit to 31,606 URLs.
Exhibition about Research & Development projects
The Scientific Research Memory is an online exhibition dedicated to the websites of scientific projects funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) that Arquivo.pt has preserved.
There are also websites of the Research & Development Units financed by FCT.
Memorial do Arquivo.pt preserves scientific websites for free
The Memorial do Arquivo.pt service has preserved historic FCT websites that have been disabled. These were created for events or initiatives that have ended and therefore their contents are no longer updated.
To include a website in the Memorial, Arquivo.pt starts by making a high quality collection of its contents.
Then, the collected contents are validated in collaboration with those responsible for the website.
Finally, the website address is redirected to the contents that have been preserved by Arquivo.pt.
For example, if someone wants to access any page on the Scientific Archives Meeting held in 2014, they will be redirected to Arquivo.pt.
Thus, the contents remain accessible over time and the links, the references in scientific communications that may exist do not break.
The digital preservation service Memorial do Arquivo.pt is free of charge for websites of the academic and scientific community, just send a request to contacto@arquivo.pt.
At the end of 2020, we recommend some texts that put the future in perspective.
We highlight the theme of preserving online content presented in the ebook “Tendências 2021” (Trends 2021). The contribution of Daniel Gomes, the Arquivo.pt manager, was entitled “Arquivos online ou do online?” (Online archives or archives of the online?).
I was invited to write about the challenges and threats to online archives. The first question that came to me was what is meant by an “online archive”?
My concern lies in the “archives of the online” because there is not even an established awareness about their need, whether at an academic, governmental or individual level.
It is technologically impossible to preserve all information available online. But it is absurd not to be aware that we have to preserve some of the information online for short, medium and long term access.
Welcome to the second season of the Online Cafe with Arquivo.pt
Talk directly to the Arquivo.pt team and get answers to all your questions! The Arquivo.pt launched a new cycle of team chats with you through online sessions. Brief introductory presentations will be given, leaving time to ask all your questions about how to get more out of Arquivo.pt or how to apply to the Arquivo.pt Awards.
Sessions held
21st session – Bilions of images to search on Arquivo.pt – all about the Arquivo.pt API
In March 2021 Arquivo.pt launched a new version with 1800 million images available. The search for images in web archives at this scale is unique in the world and innovative. The process used for indexing was explained in detail, in this session, as well as the best way to take advantage of these resources using the API to create new works based on images.
André Mourão, Ph.D. in Computer Science, is working on the indexing of the information, specially images from the Internet of the past to the present at Arquivo.pt (Portuguese Web Archive). He is a researcher working on ways to search and interpret multimedia data (e.g., images, text, video) effectively at large scales. He is also the co-creator of Revisionista.PT, uncovering post-publication edits in Portuguese news articles (with Flávio Martins) and an Associated Member at NOVA LINCS research center.
20th session – March 26 – The Online Centenary of the Great War
Daniela Major, invited speaker of the 20th Café with Arquivo.pt, presented a use case about historical research and old websites. The commemoration of the Centenary of the 1st World War generated several strategies for international cooperation in the 21st century and such diversity is present in the information published on commemorative websites. In this session, Daniela Major will show how she used Web archives to start a study in the context of Contemporary History, as well as the methodological implications in her work.
Daniela Major is a PhD student in Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. In 2019, within the scope of the ROSSIO Infrastructure, he started at Arquivo.pt a study on the celebrations of World War I based on the preserved contents of the Web. Currently, his PhD focuses on the media impact of the idea of Europe over the past few years. 15 years, in an effort to combine intellectual history with digital humanities.
This event, Cafe with Arquivo.pt, toke place for the first time 1 year ago, on the 27th march 2020. Cheers!
Special Session – March 2 – Arquivo.pt Award story and questions
Resume: The Arquivo.pt Award was created in 2018 in order to promote the use of Arquivo.pt for innotive works. How many candidates had applied since till now? What areas did the work focus on? What is the balance between Studies and Applications? Who were the winners and what were their main contributions? These and other questions were the guidelines for this session dedicated Award 2021.
This session was presented by Daniel Gomes and the Arquivo.pt team
This session was dedicated to the websites of Portuguese newspapers. Diogo Silva da Cunha talked about his first contact with Arquivo.pt and his approach, concretized in an “research route” as a way of delimiting the scope of his analysis. He also presented the results of his research about Correio da Manhã, Diário de Notícias, Expresso and Público newspapers.
Diogo Silva da Cunha is PhD student at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, collaborator at the Center for Philosophy of Sciences at the same university. He recently published a study on the preservation of newspapers’ web pages in the book “O choque tecno-liberal, os media e o jornalismo: estudos críticos sobre a realidade Portuguesa”. In 2017, he participated in the Digital Humanities project “Investiga XXI” at Arquivo.pt.
17th session – january 15 – How to do an exhibition of old web pages without being an IT expert (tutorial)
This session present by Ricardo Basílio, the Arquivo.pt digital curator, is focused in practical aspects, when preparing an exhibition of old pages. As example: the use of long links, tipical of web archives, graphic aspects to be taken into account and navigation routes between webpages. The WordPress.com is used as platform to show how easy is build a web exhibition. The core aspects of dissimination content from Web archives have application in other platforms.
16th session – december 11 – Arquivo Económico .pt
Arquivo Económico .PT, authored by Nuno Bragança, 3rd place in Arquivo.pt Awards 2020, is a WebApp that allows discovering prices on web pages along time, over a set products in frequent use and compare them with current prices. Data are obtainned automatically from Arquivo.pt, processed and presented in an intuitive way for the common user.The possibility of comparing the present with the past based on information from the archived web shows how it can be useful not only to satisfy curiosity but also to support studies in many areas.
In this session we met the winners of 2nd place the Arquivo.pt Awards 2020. Rodrigo Marques and Hugo Silva talked about the their work “Arquivo.pt Extension” wich is a browser extension that allows users to search on Arquivo.pt. They showed through practical examples how the extension save time and helps the acess to the Arquivo.pt.
Arquivo.pt launched a new version, called Basileus, on November 11, 2020.
The purpose of this version was to improve the user experience when browsing through the different interfaces of Arquivo.pt.
Adjustments were made at the level of Web design which resulted in greater consistency in the structure of the code, in the graphic aspects and in the interactions, such as colors, fonts and buttons.
The speaker for this session was the winner of the Arquivo.pt 2020 Award, Miguel Ramalho, who presented his work. “Desarquivo” is a web aplication that searches for entities on Arquivo.pt and return a graph.
As in 2017, 2018 e 2019, we invited everyone to get to know Arquivo.pt, and to use it in research and in the preservation of memory.
World Digital Preservation Day is promoted by the Digital Preservation Coalitium (UK) and an occasion for initiatives around the world, shared on social networks with the WDPD2020 hashtag.
Geocities.com was the first major “social network” which enabled anyone to create their website and publish information on the Web. It was created in 1994, acquired by Yahoo in 1999 and shut down in 2009.
Arquivo.pt also integrated Geocities history in its collections!
Now, anyone can explore Geocities through the innovative tools provided by Arquivo.pt (e.g. full-text search, image search or API).
By making the historical collection of Geocities available, Arquivo.pt intends to contribute to the development of innovative studies in areas such as Arts, Humanities or Sociology (see a project summary).
The special collection of web pages about the 2019 European Elections is available for search at Arquivo.pt.
To compile this collection, pages written in 24 European languages were identified through automatic searches on the Bing search engine and suggestions from 17 European countries.
We emphasize the collaboration of the Publications Office of the European Union, which reviewed the list of search terms in the different languages of the European Union.
Between May and July 2019, Arquivo.pt exhaustively collected pages related to the European Elections in several countries.
The resulting collection named “European Elections 2019” comprises 99 million web files that sum 4.8 Terabytes of information.
We invited all citizens, especially the researchers, to try this service especially created to search the 2019 European Elections cross-lingual and international collection: https://arquivo.pt/ee2019
Video “A transnational and cross-lingual crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019”
A transnational and cross-lingual crawl of the European Parliamentary Elections 2019, Ivo Branco, IIPC Web Archiving Conference and RESAW 2021 (slides)
