The DSA Toolkit Shines Light Into Dark and Stormy Archives

Abstract

Themed web archive collections exist to make sense of archived web pages (mementos). Some collections contain hundreds of thousands of mementos. There are many collections about the same topic. Few collections on platforms like Archive-It include standardized metadata. Reviewing the documents in a single collection thus becomes an expensive proposition. Search engines help find individual documents but do not provide an overall understanding of each collection as a whole. Visitors need to be able to understand what individual collections contain so they can make decisions about individual collections and compare them to each other. The Dark and Stormy Archives (DSA) Project applies social media storytelling to a subset of a collection to facilitate collection understanding at a glance. As part of this work, we developed the DSA Toolkit, which helps archivists and visitors leverage this capability. As part of our recent International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) grant, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Old Dominion University (ODU) piloted the DSA toolkit with the National Library of Australia (NLA). Collectively we have made numerous improvements, from better handling of NLA mementos to native Linux installers to more approachable Web User Interfaces. Our goal is to make the DSA approachable for everyone so that end-users and archivists alike can apply social media storytelling to web archives.