This guest post was authored by Abbie Grotke, Head of the Web Archiving Section.
As described in our prior blog post, we have been in the process of modernizing and making improvements to the Library of Congress Web Archives to improve functionality for users. While this work has taken us a bit longer than anticipated, we are pleased to announce the beta release of our new ”playback services” –an upgrade to the way users view content in the web archives within a browser. Characteristic of a beta release, the playback services are still being tested and refined, but we have advanced to the stage where we are ready for the public to try it out and send us their feedback.
Here are some tips to finding the beta:
First, visit our web archives at https://www.loc.gov/web-archives/ and browse to available item records. Using date range filters for content archived after 2015 will give you examples of web archives that should have results with content released on the beta. When browsing items records, beta content will be linked under the thumbnail images.
In this example, under the thumbnail image you will see text with the Source URL and other information, like below:
The “View Beta Presentation” link takes you to the new beta presentation, which has improved performance but limited content as we continue to work to ingest and index our web archives, including pre-2015 web archives and more recent content as it comes out of our one-year embargo. We will continue to roll out additional content until we move from beta to production. While we are in this beta phase, users may need to view the old and new presentations to see all content archived by the Library of Congress up through the embargo dates.
If you only see “View Captures” on an item record, the beta has not been released yet for that content – like in this example:
Clicking on “View Captures” in the blue bar across the thumbnail and in the text below will take you to our original/older OpenWayback viewer with content archived prior to 2015. However, as our prior blog post described, users of the OpenWayback version may experience outages or slow speeds while we continue to migrate all of our collections to the new playback services.
We are interested in your feedback as you begin to use the beta. Please send any comments, questions, or any other feedback about your experiences to us directly or share in the comments below.
Comments (3)
Beta Viewer is far better than your standard viewer for me as it dosen’t glitch and crash my tablet. I do however have a few questions, remarks/suggestions about the web archive in general.
Q1: Are further captures for existing sites planned?
Q2: Are there plans to add or expand on the web archive?
R/S1: Some sites only seem to be the homepage, it would be nice to be able to see the archived siteamp of what is archived
there for that particular capture. Can this be done?
R/S2: As gaming, online gaming and mobile gaming culture has epanded since 2015, a web archive category just for it would
be nice to see, especially captures that preserve playabilty of games on sites with in-browser games, such a Flash Games
and HTML5 games. Sites like miniclip or candystand for instance. Paizo should also be added as one of the best TTRPG
product suppliers, perhaps even including their free content.
Please do not respond via e-mail.
Thank you for your feedback on the web archives! I’m glad to hear that the beta playback is working well for you.
We release new web archive content on a monthly basis and are continuing to add more of our older captures to the beta playback as well.
If there is a specific URL you are looking for, you can search for it using the search bar on https://webarchive-beta.loc.gov/playback-services/general/. If you know the URL for a sitemap, you can search for it there, but we may not have archived everything on it. Another way to see what we have is to do a prefix search using https://webarchive-beta.loc.gov/playback-services/general/*?url=https://urlhere.com/&matchType=prefix and replace the URL after the equal sign with the URL of your choice. From there, you can control-F and search for content by URL or keyword (such as “PDF,” to see all PDFs). If there are specific sites you want to know more about or have questions about missing content, please message our team using the Contact Us form.
Online and mobile games are difficult to archive and currently outside the scope of our web archiving program. We have more information about the technical limitations of web crawling on our “For Researchers” page.
thanks