2019-08-30: Where did the archive go? Part 1: Library and Archives Canada

Web archives are established with the objective of providing permanent access to archived web pages, or mementos. However, in our 14-month study of 16,627 mementos from 17 public web archives, we found that three web archives changed their base URLs and did not leave a machine readable method of locating their new URLs. We were able to manually discover the three new URLs for the archives. A fourth archive has partially ceased operations. (1) Library and Archives Canada ( collectionscanada.gc.ca ) Around May 2018 , mementos in this archive were moved to a new archive ( webarchive.bac-lac.gc.ca ) which has a different domain name. We noticed that 49 mementos (out of 351) can not be found in the new archive. (2) The National Library of Ireland (NLI) Around May 2018, the European Archive ( europarchive.org ) was shut down and the domain name was purchased by another entity. The National Library of Ireland (NLI) collection preserved by this archive was moved to anothe