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!
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)
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.
On November 8, 2007, the Portuguese Web Archive was officially created and later named Arquivo.pt.
To celebrate this date, Wikimedia Portugal and Arquivo.pt have associated themselves in the organization of an online event dedicated to the preservation of the digital heritage.
Agenda
Introdução – André Barbosa, Wikimédia Portugal (Video)
15 anos de Arquivo.pt – Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt (Slides, Video)
Wikimedia na Universidade: Exploração e Projetos na NOVA FCSH – Rute Correia, Residência WMPT na NOVA FCSH, (Slides;Video)
GLAM Wiki. Uma introdução geral – Giovanna Fontenelle, Fundação Wikimédia, Brasil (Slides;Video)
Demo dos recursos em acesso livre no Arquivo.pt – Daniel Gomes (Video)
On August 15, 2021 the presidential palace in Kabul was taken over by the Taliban, consummating the fall of the regime that had been in place for 20 years, following the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
No time to lose when it comes to preserving the Web
Arquivo.pt reacted quickly, launching an automatic content search focused on .af domain sites and on international media news about the ongoing events.
On August 17, the websites began to be recorded.
1800 website addresses from Afghanistan (ending in .af) and 500 media news stories from around the world were used.
The addresses, URLs or “seeds” were obtained through automated search using the Bing Search API and immediately put into recording.
Content available to know Afghanistan’s history
As a result of the collection carried out, more than 400 Gigabytes of information became available at Arquivo.pt, which anyone can use for research in the most diverse areas.
The main contribution of Arquivo.pt to the community of Web archivists was the use of the automatic search that allows a quick reaction in the recording of Web contents in imminent risk of being lost.
The Portuguese Museums Network was the community invited to participate in the cycle of three webinars entitled “Cultural Heritage on the Web: online presence of museums”.
The aim is to raise awareness among museum managers and professionals about the importance of preserving content published on the Web and to make known the services and tools of Arquivo.pt.
This initiative is promoted by the Direção Geral do Património Cultural, through the Departamento de Museus, Conservação e Credenciação and Divisão de Museus e Credenciação, which welcomed and integrated in its training offer the proposal of Arquivo.pt (FCT, I.P.) .
Information and materials
June 21st, 2022 – The Arquivo.pt and the preservation of digital memory (1st webinar)
In this session Arquivo.pt is presented as a useful service to museums and institutions that the community can count on to preserve digital cultural heritage, specifically Web content.
Speaker: Ricardo Basílio, digital curator (in substitution of Daniel Gomes, manager of Arquivo.pt)
June 27, 2022 – Archiving the Web: DIY (3rd Webinar)
This session offers a tutorial for creating a local web archive, recording contentes in a standard format and using open tools that any person can use.
The meeting was broadcast online with the aim of sharing with the community of archivists what has been an experience of collaborative curation of Web content.
Collaboration between a municipal archive and a web archive
This meeting took place in the continuity of a collaboration between the two teams developed during the pandemic period.
The Arquivo Municipal de Sines made a selective and systematic collection of Web content related to the Municipality of Sines, with the collaboration of local media, such as Rádio Miróbriga and Rádio Sines.
In turn, Arquivo.pt contributed with training on tools, like Webrecorder.net, that records in standardized format and prepared useful services, such as SavePageNow that allows to record pages on the fly directly on Arquivo.pt.
Local history is better with preserved Web pages
From this collaboration resulted the preservation of thousands of Web pages (about 200 Gigabytes of information) about the experience of the pandemic in the geographical area of Sines and Santiago do Cacém.
The copies of the Web Archive Files (WARCs) sent to Arquivo.pt have been integrated to become available.
Does your website presents “Error 404 – Page not found” messages to your users?
Arquivo.pt offers a solution for this problem through Arquivo404.
Just insert a single line of code in the page that generates the 404 error message on your website and web-archived pages will be presented to your users instead of pages not found.
When a page is no longer on a website, Arquivo404 checks if a preserved version exists.
When a user tries to access a page that is no longer available on a website, Arquivo404 automatically checks if there is a version of that page preserved in Arquivo.pt.
If the page exists in Arquivo.pt, a link is presented so that the user may visit this version. If it does not exist, the normal error page is displayed.
The code in Arquivo404 can easily be adapted. You can for example create a customised error message.
Hint for WordPress websites: When editing the 404 error page and inserting the arquivo404 script inside the <body>, you must put the <!– wp:html –> tag at the beginning and the <!– /wp:html –> tag at the end, otherwise the script will be deleted.
If you have any questions or issues, please contact us!
