Towards A Formal Registry Of Web Archives For Persistent And Sustainable Identification

The aim of this lightning talk is to encourage a plan and common understanding for establishment of a formal registry for web archives, based on the community input.

The purpose of such a registry is to make it possible to identify web archives from which web materials have been used in research, either as part of collections or as specific references to web pages. No matter how a web element is referenced, it need to be traceable in the future where it was originally archived and then where it can be found in that point in the future. Using archive URLs, we already see that web archives shifts to new Wayback machines where the URL therefore changes, there are also examples of web archives where the placement of the resources are moved to a new domain, as e.g. the Irish web archive.

Another benefit would be that the Persistent Web IDentifier automatic can be made automatically resolvable and constructable, but there are most likely many other cases where a formal registry can point to generic patterns for services, e.g. CDX summaries and special service calls.

There have been attempts to make non-formal registries of web archives for example within IIPC (fx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_archiving_initiatives and https://netpreserve.org/about-us/members/). The challenge is that there are no unique way of identifying the actual archive by such registries, and it has no formal history track that could make it possible to use for old references to the web archive. This is bound to be a challenge, if have a 50 year horizon.