The Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa (IPL), through its Distance Learning Group (EaD@IPL), organised a series of webinars for its community dedicated to Arquivo.pt and the preservation of content published on the Internet.
This initiative was attended by IPL lecturers and researchers, as well as people linked to the institution’s communications department.
The cycle of webinars took place in three sessions, between May and July 2024, and followed the training programme that Arquivo.pt has been offering for several years.
Presentation materials
1st webinar – Arquivo.pt: a new tool for researching the past. Well publish to well preserve (June 5 , 2024)
The benefits of training with Arquivo.pt go far beyond publicising this service.
Arquivo.pt training sessions are a motivational space for people and institutions to take better care of their websites and the content they publish on the Web. Tools are given to enable immediate and creative use of the web archive.
As a result of this cycle of Webinars, the collaboration between the Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon and Arquivo.pt was strengthened, with a view to preserving institutional websites and other content of interest to the IPL community that is on various online media.
May 18, International Museum Day, was celebrated all over the country with free admission, guided tours, entertainment and exhibitions related to memory and heritage.
Arquivo.pt contributed with an exhibition of old web pages, entitled “Digital Memory through the Internet of the Past”, which was on display at one of the stands at the National Coach Museum in Lisbon.
The pages were selected to show different aspects of the Alentejo over time. From 2016, pages relating to the Heritales project were selected.
Heritales and Crowd-Recycling drew attention to the preservation of the Internet’s memory
Heritales is a project based in Évora that aims to study and disseminate heritage in all its manifestations. It is known for its main event created in 2016, HERITALES – International Heritage Film Festival.
Crowd-Recycling is a project focused on good practices for sustainability.
Heritales, Crowd-Recycling and Arquivo.pt carried out this action in collaboration with the aim of giving visibility to content published on the web over time. Preserving and giving access to digital content is fundamental to enhancing heritage.
Why an exhibition of old websites is a good idea
Making an exhibition of websites over time is relatively easy, all you have to do is come up with a theme, which can also be the history of an institution, and choose pages preserved on Arquivo.pt.
An exhibition of old websites is an original idea for the target audience. It often features texts and images that only existed on the web.
By drawing attention to the websites, we realize that many things were left unrecorded and this changes our view of the content we publish today. We start taking more care to save important pages, for example by taking action or saving them on the spot with SavePageNow.
Heritales, Crowd-Recycling and Arquivo.pt on International Museum Day at the National Coach Museum
World Internet Day was on May 17th
The day before International Museum Day was World Internet Day (May 17). The proximity of the two commemorations ties in with the theme of preserving memory.
Portugal connected to the Internet for the first time in 1991, with the FCCN project “RCCN IP Service”.
The initiatives were as follows: a journey through time, a special collection on the theme “Abril 25”, a presentation at the “50 years of April International Congress” and the inclusion of a special mention in the 2025 edition of the Arquivo.pt Award.
Memories of April 25 on the Internet exhibition
The exhibition Memories of April 25 on the Internet presents a selection of web pages about the celebrations of April 25 in various regions of the country, since the beginning of the web in the 1990s.
The criteria for choosing the pages for the exhibition were as follows:
Pages relating to the April 25 commemorations;
Pages found on Arquivo.pt on dates close to the anniversary each year;
Diversity to include different areas of the country;
Popular demonstrations and official ceremonies.
A historical memory without web archives is incomplete. The aim of this journey through time is to invite citizens to travel back in time, browsing through old web pages and reliving recent episodes in our life as a democracy.
The dataset contains a list of keywords put into a search engine in order to obtain results on the topic of “April 25”. The search considered names of people, places, political, social and cultural aspects, as well as words associated with the event.
The searches were carried out on March 22, 2024 using the Bing Search API, an automatic search service that returns results according to the relevance criteria of the Bing service itself and others configured by us.
A total of 12,650 unique web page addresses were obtained. It is hoped that the recording of these pages will be useful for the organizations that produced this content, for researchers who want to study our history and for citizens who cultivate a sense of memory and democracy.
Participation in the 50 years of April International Congress
João Gomes, Director of Advanced Services, FCCN-FCT presenting the Arquivo.pt Memorial service at the 50 years of April International Congress
On May 2, 2024, João Gomes, Director of Advanced Services at the FCCN Scientific Computing Unit of the Foundation for Science and Technology I.P., presented Arquivo.pt to the participants of the 50 years of April International Congress, as a distinctive service, open to citizens and useful for organizations.
Arquivo.pt is a web preservation service available to all citizens who want to search for old content published on the web.
Using Arquivo.pt contributes to a better understanding of our history. It also provides useful services for cybersecurity, such as the Arquivo.pt Memorial, which is able to maintain institutions’ old websites, preventing attacks and saving them resources.
Special mention for “April 25 and Democracy” at the Arquivo.pt Awards 2025
In 2025, as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of April 25, a special mention will be made of work on the theme “April 25 and Democracy”.
We therefore challenge researchers and interested citizens to create innovative works using Arquivo.pt.
If you have any questions about the Arquivo.pt Award, please contact us.
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 winners of the Arquivo.pt Award 2023 were announced by the Público newspaper, the official communication partner of this edition, on 26 June.
40 applications were received.
The award ceremony tooke place during the closing session of the Encontro Ciência (Portuguese Science Summit), on July 7, at Aveiro University.
1st place – “Viajar no tempo sobre carris”
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
