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Web Archives: Exploring the Digital Past: Other Web Archives

How to find, make use of, and create your own web archives!

Other Archives

Smaller web archives come in many forms, and are available (or not available) to the public to varying degrees. Oftentimes, these smaller archives collect web resources associated a specific organization, or within a specific top-level domain. This page goes over the most common types.

Small/Specialist Archives

Some archives have similarly broad goals as the internet Archive or the Memento Project, but either have fewer resources, more specialized interests, or different methodology, with the end result being a smaller collection. These initiatives can help fill holes in the collections of larger archives, or may provide special tools that those larger archives don't.

Examples

  • archive.today -  archive.today is another general archive, smaller than the Internet Archive, which is distinguished by its robust support for Web 2.0 features and its ability to save a static snapshot of a webpage as a .png image.

  • Arquivo -  Arquivo is a Portugese web archiving initiative (available in English) which preserves websites in multiple languages.

  • Rhizome -  Rhizome is a web archiving initative with a focus on born-digital art, media, and culture. Their public collections are mostly small, highly-curated exhibits which demonstrate some change or trend in the internet over time, when viewed as a whole. Also notable for providing a number of tools for personal web-archiving, made with the goal of decentralizing records of the internet.

National Archives

These are archives which attempt to preserve all of the digital culture of a certain country or other political entity. These are usually run by governments, and often focus their archival process by only preserving webpages from a country's associated top-level domain (.us, .jp, etc).

Examples

  • Trove -  Trove is Australia's national digital repository, and includes the Australian Web Archive, which mostly consists of content collected from the earlier PANDORA national archiving project.

  • Webarchiv -  Webarchiv is the Czech national web archive, notable for its surprising size and the fact that it considers public nominations of websites to be included.

Organizational Archives

Most archives maintained by private organizations are not fully available to the public, though some may be made public to comply with transparency laws. These archives are usually created using a suite of software known as enterprise-class archival software. To learn more about enterprise-class archival solutions, please see our Doing Your Own Web Archiving.