KEEP websites alive - Active Solutions for Preserving Internet Content (IIPC)

The World Wide Web is fragile as websites come and go. That is why the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) aims to acquire, preserve and make accessible knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations. The IIPC stimulates organisations worldwide to capture websites and it supports development of permanent access solutions.

Today, websites contain a huge variety of digital media. Text is enriched with illustrations and embedded sound, videos and other animations. Although a lot of effort is already taken to capture the content, far less is known about how to retain access to such a born-digital collection. The challenge is how to ensure that sound can still be heard and videos still be played. Furthermore, websites offer a certain kind of appearance and interactivity with the user that is completely different from any other digital document.

The difference is that websites are strongly dependent on a software environment. You need a web browser, an operating system, additional fonts, plugins, audio and video decoders and possibly a whole range of other software applications to handle all media formats on the web. As these environmental aspects change over time via new releases of browsers, new font sets and upgrades of operating systems, so too will the look-and-feel of a website. For example, a missing Adobe Flash plug-in prevents you from watching YouTube videos. Browsers themselves also show variations; many people will still remember the differences in rendering a website with Netscape Navigator compared to the same website in Internet Explorer. These notable differences are all caused by the underlying configuration of the computer environment. Therefore, it is essential not only to preserve website content, but also to retain access to the authentic environment that renders it. This means the computer environment itself needs to be preserved.

KEEP is working on a solution that is very attractive for access to website collections as well. Jeffrey presented the goals of KEEP and how the tools can be applied to retain access to websites. By means of emulation a computer environment (hardware and software) is recreated that can render any kind of digital object again. A special piece of software, called an emulator, supports the recreation of the original computer environment by mimicking the functionality of hardware and running old software, such as an internet browser. With this configuration, old websites preserved by archives and libraries across the world can be experienced in their native environment again, just like the web was back in its early days.

Links:

IIPC website: http://www.netpreserve.org

IIPC Programme & presentations: http://www.netpreserve.org/events/program.php

KEEP presentation “KEEP websites alive”: http://www.netpreserve.org/events/active_solutions/6_2009-10-05_IIPC_emulation_jrvanderhoeven_keep_layout.pdf

See some pictures in our gallery, by (c) Inge Angevaare: