archivech

Archivech is a fictional digital archiving platform used to illustrate the design and operation of modern web archiving projects. It aims to preserve publicly accessible online content for scholarly, cultural heritage, and public access purposes, emphasizing long-term availability, metadata richness, and openness to reuse.

Origin and development: In this hypothetical narrative, Archivech emerged from a coalition of libraries, universities, and a national archive in 2015. A first public prototype appeared in 2017, followed by iterative releases and community contributions.

Scope and methods: Archivech focuses on capturing web pages, PDFs, multimedia, and public social-media content within legal boundaries. It uses the WARC interchange format for storage, along with accompanying metadata in a Dublin Core–based schema extended for preservation.

Technology and architecture: The project is open-source under a permissive license. It employs a distributed crawl system, content-addressable storage, checksums, and retention-aware migration pipelines to newer formats.

Access and governance: Access may be public or restricted to institutional members. Archival collections can be searched and browsed, with metadata available for reuse. Governance is provided by a non-profit association with community input and open-source governance.

Challenges and reception: Typical issues include legal constraints (copyright and robots.txt), scaling for large datasets, funding sustainability, and ensuring data integrity over decades.

See also: Web archiving, Internet Archive, LOCKSS, CLOCKSS.