WORKSHOP D

Historian as User of the Internet Archive: Historical Record on the Web, from "Way-back" in 1996

Marija Dalbello
Rutgers University of New Jersey, School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, USA

One of the key functions of archives is to enable historians is to understand what happened in the past. The Internet Archive (IA) is a multi-terabyte repository of Web content and the most extensive existing effort of archiving the indexable Web. The purpose of the IA, from a statement from its home page, is to build "a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form." A record of successive manifestations of published web pages is a major component of the IA, accessible to the public from Oct. 24, 2001. By means of Wayback Machine search engine it is possible to retrieve historical transformation of cultural artifacts in digital form to study events and processes previously not observable. The workshop will focus on the user side and uses of the historical record accessible via the IA and explore the possible uses of this resource by historians. Because the IA mirrors the function of libraries to become the memories and repositories of human activity, the workshop will address the issue of why it matters to understand this resource in light of day to day activities in libraries and archives.   

Since its inception in 1996, the IA served as a laboratory for research teams to conduct studies on retrieval methods. Because it mirrors the structure of the Web, this resource provided testbed to improve the performance of search engines and other tools for navigating the web. In such studies, the archive is conceptualized in terms of graph structure (represented by link relationships of the WWW, with millions of nodes and even more edges), to be manipulated in retrieval processes by high-performance retrieval tools (Suel & Yuan 2001; Singhal & Kaszkiel 2001). These researchers focus on the methods of compressing the archives (as representation of the structure of the Web in spite of its exponential growth) and on modeling the space mathematically (Lawrence & Giles 1998). This space is built from web documents as single static HTML files, identifiable by name (universal resource locator). The naming is a crucial element of such distributed systems. The retrieval processes in such repository are limited to the known item search (via the universal locator) to retrieve all manifestations of discrete archival unit (the web page). This limitation of the resource is resolved through introduction of metadata (compressed representations of documents) and indexing (natural language processing).  The methods or organization and representation like those in the traditional library and the archives, where discrete information objects are processed more or less through human intervention, are not viable. Another limitation is the nature of the record that includes the visual and the textual information. The retrieval challenges and challenges of syndetic structuring presented by large and naturally occurring universes of documents will persist for information scientists and retrieval engineers.     

The workshop will focus on the user side of this repository of raw historical information and potential uses for historical research. Since becoming public in 2001, the IA attracted a community of users, reflecting new uses for the Web resources. Libraries can take this opportunity to model their information services and tools to incorporate the changing nature of records. The workshop will address the informal uses of the IA resources, while its primary focus will be on the uses for the Internet Archive repository as a resource for historians and historical research. The workshop will define the status of archival representation of this collection as distinct from the models of the archives currently developed by the archival and library community. From the point of view of historiography, attention will be paid to the problem of selection bias and shaping the collections through the lens of canonical "History" (Lustick 1996) as opposed to providing access to an unshaped record of the past (Panofsky 1936). The implications for historical research community will be discussed in the context of an overall impact of the Web, and the explosion of electronic resources on historical research (Everett 1998; Emmett 2002) and in the area of humanities.  The discourse of the archive and historical record has traditionally been related to genre. Tracking transformations and establishing historical sequences provided by the web pages is a reflection of social and organizational processes that are of interest to historians of the Internet environment. The relevant aspect of theories of literary and cultural analysis, and especially genre theory (White 1986) will be engaged in developing a historiography perspective provided by the IA. Current developments in the area of web historiography and research will be discussed, and the benefits of incorporating the record of the Web in traditional historiography.   

Case studies of the use of the IA for historical research will be presented, based on the workshop leader's current research on the history of digital library projects. The workshop participants will be encouraged to discuss the possible uses for the Internet Archive in library and archival work; the limitations of that repository in terms of shaped collections through archival and library collection principles. 

The workshop is aimed to those interested in research implications of the IA, especially those who wish to learn more about the limitations and intricacies of querying the IA from a user point of view. Practitioners concerned with freedom of access, privacy and collection development issues, provision of reference service and uses of memory records will benefit from the workshop.  Practitioners can benefit from understanding how to integrate this resource with their existing collections. The current uses of the IA to memorialize and recreate historical events in the form of exhibit the public record of 9/11 demonstrate the ways by which this resource is integrated with the activities of archival and museum displays and collections. The workshop will be conducted in English, while participants are encouraged to make their contributions in English and Croatian.
 
REFERENCES

1.	Emmett, R.B. (2002). Surfing the Past: The Role of the Internet in the Future of the History of Economics. History of Political Economy 34, Annual Supplement, 245-260.
2.	Everett, J.E. (1998). Annual Review of Information Technology Developments for Economic and Social Historians, 1997. The Economic History Review, New Series 51, (No. 2, May), 382-397.
3.	Internet Archive. Retrieved January 10, 2004 from http://www.archive.org.
4.	Lawrence, S. & Giles, C. L. (1998). Searching the World Wide Web, Science, New Series 280 (No. 5360, Apr. 3), 98-100.   
5.	Lustick, I.S. (1996). History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias. The American Political Science Review 90 (3), 605-618.
6.	Panofsky, E. (1957). The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline. In Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1-25. New York: Doubleday.
7.	Singhal, A. & Kaszkiel, M. (2001). A Case Study in Web Search using TREC Algorithms. WWW10, Hong Kong, May 1-5, 2001. (ACM 1-58113-348-0/01/0005). Retrieved on January 10, 2004 at http://www10.org/cdrom/papers/pdf/p317.pdf.
8.	Suel, T. &Yuan, J. (2001). Compressing the Graph Structure of the Web. Retrieved on January 10, 2004 from http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/23869/http:zSzzSzcis.poly.eduzSzsuelzSzpaperszSzgraph.pdf/suel01compressing.pdf.  
9.	White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.