A survey on web archiving initiatives

Abstract

Web archiving has been gaining interest and recognized importance for modern societies around the world. However, for web archivists it is frequently difficult to demonstrate this fact, for instance, to funders. This study provides an updated and global overview of web archiving. The obtained results showed that the number of web archiving initiatives significantly grew after 2003 and they are concentrated on developed countries.We statistically analyzed metrics, such as, the volume of archived data, archive file formats or number of people engaged. Web archives all together must process more data than any web search engine. Considering the complexity and large amounts of data involved in web archiving, the results showed that the assigned resources are scarce. A Wikipedia page was created to complement the presented work and be collaboratively kept up-to-date by the community