Browsing and Recomposition Policies to Minimize Temporal Error When Utilizing Web Archives

Public web archiving on a large scale began in the late 1990s with archives such as Australia’s Pandora and the Internet Archive. These archives were (and still are) much less rigorous than records management systems; indeed, they do not have the resources needed to approach records management rigor. Thus the archives are incomplete, which leads to temporal discrepancies when browsing the archives and recomposing web pages. When browsing, the user-selected target datetime drifts without notice. When viewing a composite resource, the embedded resources may have a temporal spread of many years, which is invisible to the user. Preliminary investigation has confirmed and partially measured these temporal issues. This proposed body of work will measure drift and spread, determining their impact on web archive usability, and develope policies and heuristics to balance completeness, temporal coherence, and usability based on user goals.