The long-term preservation of Web content

Web archiving initiatives exist to collect ephemeral Web content for use by current and future generations of users. To date, most such initiatives have concentrated on the development of strategies and software tools for the collection of Web content and for providing current access to this content through interfaces like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) is currently building on this legacy with the collaborative development of a set of tools that can be used for the capture of Web sites and for the navigation and searching of Web archives. The focus on collection strategies and tools is a response to what is perhaps the most significant challenge of the Web from an information management perspective. Its dynamic nature means that pages, sites and even whole domains are continually evolving or disappearing. It is difficult to get accurate and up-to-date statistics on Web page longevity, but a range of studies hint at the ultra dynamic nature of the Web. A study by Lawrence, et al. (2001) cited an Alexa Internet estimate that pages disappeared on average after 75 days. Longitudinal studies of Web page persistence by Koehler (2004) found that just 33.8 per cent of a sample set of pages selected in December 1996 persisted at their original URLs by May 2003. Studies of the longevity of Web references in scientific journals show similar trends. For example, a 2003 study of Internet ci-