[Pasig-discuss] Archiving all flash websites

[Stefana Breitwieser]

Hi Warren,

I'd actually recommend using WebRecorder<https://webrecorder.io/> by Rhizome. It's a free, very user-friendly tool that generally speaking does a great job capturing Flash. You can also store up to 5GB on their site with playback through the browser, which makes storage and access fairly straightforward. Alternately, you could also download the WARC (web archiving file) and manage it locally, and play it back using any number of web archive players, like the WebRecorder Player<https://github.com/webrecorder/webrecorderplayer-electron/releases/tag/v1.0.9>. (That said, I haven't tested any local playback tools and can't recommend any one in particular.) We use Archivematica, and though we're not currently managing any WARCs locally, WARCs are a stable, widely-accepted preservation format and storage would more than likely be fine.

This might be a better solution than using the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. (Their paid service, Archive-It<https://archive-it.org/>, is great but can be expensive.) You can request for a page to be crawled for free on the Wayback Machine<https://archive.org/web/> (see: "Save Page Now"), but there's no quality assurance step to ensure that you get a good capture. Their free crawler has pretty mixed results with Flash, and to my knowledge, there's no method to save files locally via the public interface.

In short, I think WebRecorder can be a really great solution for small-scale web archives. It has a very low technical overhead for a very high quality capture, and will cost you only the time you spend on it.

Good luck!

Stefana

Stefana Breitwieser
Archiviste, Traitement des archives numériques
Digital Processing Archivist

Centre Canadien d'Architecture
Canadian Centre for Architecture
T 514 939 7001 x 1520
www.cca.qc.ca<http://www.cca.qc.ca>

De : Pasig-discuss [mailto:pasig-discuss-bounces at asist.org] De la part de Weber, Warren SA
Envoyé : Monday, March 12, 2018 2:10 PM
À : pasig-discuss at mail.asis.org
Objet : [Pasig-discuss] Archiving all flash websites

Hi everyone. We are looking at trying to preserve two of our online exhibits that are built in an all flash environment from 2005. Doing some research into this, it seems that the popular opinion is to try and get the internet archive to crawl it and keep it online for future use.

I would like to know what others have done in this instance. Rebuilding the exhibits are out of the question as the budget for doing anything with these is exactly $0. We are, howeve,r doing a migration to AtoM/Archivematica so if anyone has any experience using those tools to preserve  the flash exhibits like ours, I would like to hear about that.

Thanks!

Warren Weber
Manager, Information Technology Services
Corporate Services
Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan
p: 306-787-0705
f:  306-787-1975
e: wweber at archives.gov.sk.ca<mailto:wweber at archives.gov.sk.ca>
www.saskarchives.com<http://www.saskarchives.com/>

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