Archive-It 5.0 Changes and New Features
As a web preservation intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I capture and preserve the Smithsonian’s web presence using the Archive-It crawling service. In October 2014, Archive-It released Phase 1 of Archive-It 5.0, which featured the roll-out of a new interface and more robust data collection for post-crawl reports. Currently the service allows users to switch between the 4.9 and 5.0 versions. Archive-It offers ten new features for reports, which include quick text box filter, infographics, the ability to add notes, and the option to compare two crawl reports side by side. The reports generated by web crawls play a large part in the Archives’ web collection packages and quality assurance (QA), so the changes between versions 4.9 and 5.0 are important for us to understand as we attempt to preserve the record of the ephemeral web.
Version 4.9 Crawl Report
Version 5.0 Crawl Report
Archive-It One-Time IDs
The snapshots above were taken of the same crawl report, one in 4.9 and the other in 5.0. The new format and interface are not the only differences. The one-time IDs (identifiers) are different. For this crawl version 4.9 was assigned 20150320165024358, and version 5.0 was assigned 149112. While the Archives does not fully rely on these numbers as identifiers for crawls, they are attached to the file name when a summary/overview report and the WARC files are downloaded for our collections. Currently, the ability to switch back and forth between 4.9 and 5.0 makes this issue moot, but once this capability is removed those reports and WARC files downloaded with the 4.9 ID will be more difficult to locate and identify in the new Archive-It reports. Archive-It does not mention this change on the Wikis it has provided regarding the roll-out of 5.0. This change could be problematic for those organizations who use these IDs to identify crawls.
Report Summary Data
Part of our web collection packages include downloading the host data and the report summary from the post-crawl report. The host download provides the URLs that were archived from each host as well as other information such as new data, documents blocked by robots.txt, and out-of-scope documents. When switching between 4.9 and 5.0, the only change is the interface and the ability to browse hosts by seed for more robust data.
When viewing 5.0, the report summary is now called an overview but with the same type of data. However, I noticed a few discrepancies. The data is not consistent when switching between the two versions. The snapshots of the same crawl above show different numbers for the Total Documents Archived. Version 4.9 archived 12,440 documents while version 5.0 archived 12,386 documents. It is unclear why the data is different when switching between the two versions.
New Features Overall
The interface of the 5.0 reports page is an improvement. The one-time IDs are now visible, however the collection name is cut off if the collections name is too long, requiring users to hover over the name to see it in its entirety. The reports page quick text box filter is a helpful feature. The search function is more flexible than 4.9, which only allowed searches by collection name or date.
The new view feature provides users with a link from the reports page directly to the Wayback Machine to view the URL without having to navigate to this resource through the access tab. This feature can help improve our quality assurance (QA) workflow. QA involves ensuring our crawl and capture of the site accurately represents what the website displayed at the time of the crawl. Wayback allows us to view the crawl results visually in website form unlike the reports and hosts which provide numerical data about the crawl.
Overall, the 5.0 features are an improvement on this service, which is an important tool for archiving the record of the Smithsonian today.
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