Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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)  collect...

The Memento Protocol provides a Memento-Datetime header indicating at what datetime a memento was captured by a given web archive. In most cases, this metadata sufficiently informs the user of when the given web resource existed. Even though it has been established in US courts that web archives can be used to legally establish that a given web resource existed at a given time , there is still potential to doubt this timestamp because the same web archive that provides the memento also provides its Memento-Datetime . Though not a replacement for Memento-Datetime,  trusted timestamping is the process that provides certainty of timestamps for content and can be used to provide additional data to alleviate this doubt. In this post, I examine different trusted timestamping methods. I start with some of the more traditional methods before discussing  OriginStamp , a solution by Gipp, Meuschke, and Gernandt that uses the Bitcoin blockchain for timestamping. Brief Crypto...