A Definitive Guide on Website Archiving

Web archiving is getting increasingly popular by the day. It provides a number of benefits to businesses, educational and governmental institutions. If you are still not quite sure what web archiving actually is, then this article is for you.

What is Web Archiving?

Web archiving is a fairly simple process of collecting information displayed on the various websites on the World Wide Web and storing them in a digital format for future reference. It is a useful process for all kinds of institutions as it allows for easy storage of important information.

Due to the magnanimity of the websites on the internet, it is virtually impossible to manually save information from them on a regular basis. Thus, most institutions that require archiving data from a large number of websites tend to use one of the several automated web archiving tools that are now available in the market.  These tools use web crawlers to crawl through the websites and once the crawl is completed, the data is stored at the desired location.

What are Web Crawlers?

A web crawler is an internet bot that browses websites on the internet for the purpose of indexing them. It enables users to search more efficiently as the data from websites copied and downloaded by it is processed and indexed by search engines.

How are Web Archives stored?

The industry standard of storing web archives is the WARC format as it is capable of combining a number of digital resources into an archive and is also quite flexible to any kind of changes. All web archives are stored with a timestamp which makes them much more authentic than simple screenshots of websites.

Why is it important to archive websites?

• For business organizations, web archiving can help them in case of any legal trouble in the future. Keeping an accurate record of every single thing that ever went on the websites related to their organization can help refute, with evidence, any claims of having published something they never did.
• Leading brands across the globe are producing a tremendous amount of data for their respective websites. A part of maintaining a brand is to keep a constant check on how the public is responding to the various features being rolled out. A web archive can help brands revisit the designs of their websites that derived the maximum amount of traffic. This assists their web designing teams in analyzing customer needs and making the desired changes.
• Public sector organizations and educational institutions generally engage in web archiving to store crucial pieces of information about historical and cultural significance. Just as we now use the books written by people in the 1800s to get an idea about society in that age, future generations will be able to refer to our web archives and get an idea of the trends and tastes of people in our time.
• Web archiving is a great source of keeping a record for things that no longer exist on the World Wide Web. There are a number of iconic websites that are no longer functional but people can still access them because of the web archives maintained by various organizations.

How can you do web archiving?

Now that you know about web archiving and its benefits, you need to know how you can do it:

Web archiving is one of the complex forms of digital archiving because of the sheer magnitude of the data to be archived. Another hurdle is that technology used in developing websites is constantly changing and thus, web archiving tools, too, have to constantly update their programs.

Despite this, there are a number of website archiving tools available on the internet. If you are looking to invest in one of these, you should carefully consider the pros and cons each one has to offer based on the type of business or organization you need it for.

Web archiving is a crucial activity irrespective of the type of business you are running. It is important that you keep yourself updated with the updates related to web archiving so that you can make the process more efficient for yourself.