Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: The Browsertrix Tool Suite For the Saving Ads project and the Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project , we have used Browsertrix Crawler , ArchiveWeb.page , and ReplayWeb.page , which are Webrecorder tools that were discussed in Walsh et al.’s paper “ High Fidelity Web Archiving of News Sites and New Media with Browsertrix .” In this paper, Walsh et al. describe tools that are integrated with Browsertrix and the features that differentiated their tools from other web archive crawlers and replay systems. Browsertrix is a free and open-source web archiving platform that can be run locally , self-hosted , or used through Webrecorder's hosted service . Browsertrix uses Browsertrix Crawler for archiving web pages, ArchiveWeb.page to patch archived web pages, and ReplayWeb.page to replay archived web pages (Figure 1). Walsh, Tessa, Henry Wilkinson, and Ilya Kreymer. “High Fidelity Web Archiving of News Sites and New Media with Browsertrix.” in Proceedings of the 2024 Int...

The Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project has started this year and is funded by the IIPC . This project will focus on the synergy between web archiving, gaming, and video game live streaming platforms. One of the goals for this project is to apply gaming concepts to web archiving. For this blog post, I will focus on the integration of web archiving and the gaming concept of speedruns . For my initial example of an archiving speedrun, I gave Brozzler and Browsertrix Crawler a set of URLs to archive and I recorded the archiving session to see which crawler would finish the set first. The set consisted of 20 URLs that were selected from a dataset that I will use for future automated livestreams. I also created a livestream script that will run two crawlers beside each other while they are archiving a set of URLs. The first speedrun round is included below. During this speedrun Browsertrix was able to reach the halfway point ( 10 URLs archived ) faster than Brozzler. Brozzler...