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For a quarter-century, memory institutions have been preserving web-based content. These web archives have been collected and stored in ARC and WARC (W/ARC) file formats and will form a basis for contemporary histories. Yet, these formats present significant challenges to researchers who wish to access and use web archival data. This is primarily due to the nature of collecting, storing, and providing access to these multifaceted digital objects. In other words, web archives are messy. Applying traditional archival methods of description to digital-born collections is complicated due to issues of provenance, original order, and scale. However, we believe that archival description offers a practical starting point for thinking about access. This paper argues a robust finding aid must extend beyond basic collection-level description to allow for more meaningful interactions with web archives. As such, we propose a reimagining of a traditional finding-aid model into a three-level mode of description to include computational methods, the generation of derivative datasets, and interactive code-rich notebooks. These three factors combine to ultimately contribute to the expanded access and use of web archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the 1990s be considered the history of the present? As historians turn to study this period and beyond, they will encounter a historical record that is radically different from what has ever existed before. Old websites, social media, blogs, photographs, and videos are all part of the massive quantities of digital information that technologists, librarians, archivists, and organizations such as the Internet Archive have been collecting for the past three decades. This article explores how this dramatic shift in our historical record changes the work of historians. It does so in two main ways. First, it outlines the approaches, methods, tools, and search functions that can help a historian turn web documents into historical sources. Secondly, it considers the implications of the size and scale of digital sources, which amount to more information than historians have ever had at their fingertips, and much of which are by and about people who have traditionally been absent from the historical record. As a way to make these points tangible, it does so primarily through an in-depth case study of working with the GeoCities. com web archive, a collection of hundreds of millions of 1990s webpages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary and future historians need to grapple with and confront the challenges posed by web archives. These large collections of material, accessed either through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine or through other computational methods, represent both a challenge and an opportunity to historians. Through these collections, we have the potential to access the voices of millions of non-elite individuals (recognizing of course the cleavages in both Web access as well as method of access). To put this in perspective, the Old Bailey Online currently describes its monumental holdings of 197,745 trials between 1674 and 1913 as the 'largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published.' GeoCities.com, a platform for everyday web publishing in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, amounted to over thirty-eight million individual webpages. Historians will have access, in some form, to millions of pages: written by everyday people of various classes, genders, ethnicities, and ages. While the Web was not a perfect democracy by any means - it was and is unevenly accessed across each of those categories - this still represents a massive collection of non-elite speech. Yet a figure like thirty-eight million webpages is both a blessing and a curse. We cannot read every website, and must instead rely upon discovery tools to find the information that we need. Yet these tools largely do not exist for web archives, or are in a very early state of development: what will they look like? What information do historians want to access? We cannot simply map over web tools optimized for discovering current information through online searches or metadata analysis. We need to find information that mattered at the time, to diverse and very large communities. Furthermore, web pages cannot be viewed in isolation, outside of the networks that they inhabited. In theory, amongst corpuses of millions of pages, researchers can find whatever they want to confirm. The trick is situating it into a larger social and cultural context: is it representative? Unique? In this paper, 'Lost in the Infinite Archive,' I explore what the future of digital methods for historians will be when they need to explore web archives. Historical research of periods beginning in the mid-1990s will need to use web archives, and right now we are not ready. This article draws on first-hand research with the Internet Archive and Archive-It web archiving teams. It draws upon three exhaustive datasets: the large Web ARChive (WARC) files that make up Wide Web Scrapes of the Web; the metadata-intensive WAT files that provide networked contextual information; and the lifted-straight-from-the-web guerilla archives generated by groups like Archive Team. Through these case studies, we can see - hands-on - what richness and potentials lie in these new cultural records, and what approaches we may need to adopt. It helps underscore the need to have humanists involved at this early, crucial stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact that a series of Archives Unleashed datathon events have had on community engagement both within the web archiving field, and more specifically, on the professional practices of attendees. We present results from surveyed datathon participants, in addition to related evidence from our events, to discuss how our participants saw the datathons as dramatically impacting both their professional practices as well as the broader web archiving community. Drawing on and adapting two leading community engagement models, we combine them to introduce a new understanding of how to build and engage users in an open-source digital humanities project. Our model illustrates both the activities undertaken by our project as well as the related impact they have on the field. The model can be broadly applied to other digital humanities projects seeking to engage their communities. Examines community engagement with datathon events to propose how to build and engage users in open-source DH projects [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented regarding the 42nd Canadian Federal Election on the social media website Twitter with reference to a research by the Web Archives for Historical Research Group at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, analyzing a significantly large number of tweets. Topics discussed include capturing of the tweets with #elxn42 hashtag, use of the twarc, a command line tool, for data collection, and ways of archiving.

A letter to the editor is presented related to the deletion of digital archives by internet service provider Yahoo! Inc.