Let’s dig into the introduction of what Website Archiving is. Website archiving is the process of automatically collecting websites and asset the information they contain and storing them in a lasting digital archive. Hence making it accessible to users. An Archived website is the only way of capturing digital records in a form that is timestamped and unchangeable.it allows organizations to replay their websites from the desired point in time.
By far the most common form of web archiving is client-side, also referred to as remote harvesting. In this process, web crawlers use the HTTP protocol to gain content directly from a server by crawling all the links associated with a specific ‘seed’ URL.
How may Archiving Services help?
Website archiving services use crawling technology, to take snapshots of the website. Archiving is an automated process that saves your time and prevents the installation of any software. Archiving tools have dynamic monitoring such as capturing of new webpages and changes to existing pages. the website archive stays up to date and allows a user the most convenient way.
Archived website tool can capture client-side generated webpages by JavaScript/Ajax frameworks, including Ajax-loaded content.
Live website browsing
Some archiving services help with Live Website Browsing where a user can see exactly what their website looked like on a specific date. Logging into the dashboard, provided by archiving services, allow them to view a list of all archived websites. click on a specific archive to open the website as if it is still live.
Allowing them to select two dates and view the textual modifications between. Services may also make it most convenient by highlighting deletions in red and additions are highlighted in green to see exactly what changed on the site from one version to another.
Difficulties and limitations
Web archives that rely on web crawling as their primary means of collecting the Web are influenced by the difficulties of web crawling.
The robot exclusion protocol may request crawlers not access portions of a website. Some web archivists may ignore the request and crawl those portions anyway. Further, Large portions of a website may be hidden in the Deep Web. For example, the results page behind a web form can lie in the Deep Web if crawlers cannot follow a link to the results page.
Also, Crawler Traps (e.g., calendars) may cause a crawler to download an infinite number of pages. crawlers are usually configured to limit the number of dynamic pages they crawl. The Web is changing so fast that portions of a website may change before a crawler has even finished crawling it.
General limitations:
Some web servers are configured to return different pages to web archiver requests than they would in response to regular browser requests. This is typically done to fool search engines into directing more user traffic to a website and is often done to avoid accountability or to provide enhanced content only to those browsers that can display it.
Not only web archivists deal with the technical challenges of web archiving, but they must also contend with intellectual property laws. However national libraries in some countries have a legal right to copy portions of the web under an extension of a legal deposit. the archived websites are only accessible from certain locations or have regulated usage.
