Introduction

Internet archives are crawling, storing and managing enormous large collections of Internet content. These archives contain essential parts of our culture heritages and need to be preserved for future generations.

While crawling and storing these objects is a complex task itself, the Internet archives are facing a new emerging challenge concerning objects in outdated formats. Millions of objects, such as texts, photos, videos, sounds and many more are stored in a remarkable variety of formats within Internet archives. The evolution of these formats danger large amounts of archived data to become inaccessible and not readable in the near future. Whenever the software to render these objects and the documentation describing the internal structure of the formats are not longer available, these objects will become uninterpretable bit streams.

Continuous migration can help to provide access on information of harvested objects in the future. We developed a preservation workflow to migrate the content of WARC archives. A set of tools was developed to support the workflow including identification, extraction and verification of objects. These tools allow to perform migration actions and provide simple validation functions for migrated objects.

Publications

Toolkit

will be published soon

Workflow overview

Team

Stephan Strodl

Andreas Rauber