Preserve Your Website with Webrecorder

One of the challenges we’re facing right now at our institution is how to preserve old websites (read Kris’ last-ever DTLT post on this very issue. And we’re not the only ones; check out what the NYT is doing). As we were working with our library, I was introduced to this took for “recording” websites, Webrecorder.io. It is an open source project by Rhizome and the New Museum, funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From the website:

Webrecorder takes a new approach to web archiving by “recording” network traffic and processes within the browser while the user interacts with a web page. Unlike conventional crawl-based web archiving methods, this allows even intricate websites, such as those with embedded media, complex Javascript, user-specific content and interactions, and other dynamic elements, to be captured and faithfully restaged.

They also have a 7-minute introductory video that is really helpful. There is also a desktop app you can download, but for one-off web recording, you can do it directly on the homepage.

One of the advantages it is that it preserves and recreates the website (including, apparently, Flash), which could be a game changer for preserving websites and e-literature and art that use these now-obsolete languages. I admittedly don’t have any really complex websites, but I tried it on my old blog, and while I took a while (just running in another tab while I write this), it was easy and the files I was left with were easy to retrieve to save in my own archive.

How have you been archiving parts of the web at your institution? 

[Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash]