nowarchived

Nowarchived is a web archiving initiative and repository dedicated to preserving digital content by capturing web pages as close to the moment of archiving as possible. It aims to combat link rot and the loss of online information by maintaining time-stamped snapshots that can be accessed independently of the original site.

Origin and governance: Nowarchived emerged from collaborations among academic libraries, research libraries, and digital preservation practitioners in the early 2020s. It operates as a nonprofit organization and emphasizes open-source software and open data principles. The project publishes its software under an open license and relies on community contributions for crawlers, metadata, and interfaces.

Features: The platform supports real-time or near-real-time crawls, wide coverage of public web content, and user-submitted submissions. Data is exposed via an API and a public web interface; common archival formats such as WARC are used, with metadata available in Dublin Core and PREMIS schemas. Snapshots receive persistent identifiers and can be cited in scholarly work.

Impact and limitations: Nowarchived serves researchers, journalists, educators, and archivists who require stable references to online material. It complements traditional archives by capturing ephemeral content such as social media posts and dynamic pages. Challenges include scale, copyright questions for paid or restricted content, and performance constraints for large collections.

See also: Internet Archive, Perma.cc, Webrecorder.