IIPC TSS Webinar: The Memento Tracer Framework for Scalable High-Quality Web Archiving

The IIPC Technical Speaker Series (TSS) facilitates knowledge sharing and foster conversations and collaborations among IIPC members around web archiving technical work. During this webinar, Martin Klein, will talk about the Memento Tracer framework, developed by the Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. The framework aims to find a balance between operating at web scale and providing high-quality archival records. The Tracer approach is based on a human curator interacting with a web resource to establish its essential components and mark its boundary for the archiving process. These interactions are recorded as what we call a Trace. This Trace can then be used to guide a browser-based capture process that automatically replays the recorded transactions and thereby delivers high-quality captures of web resources. A trace can be applied to all resources of the same class, for example all slide decks on Slideshare or all repositories in Github, and hence enabling the framework to operate at scale. In addition, for transparency, to foster collaboration, and to avoid duplicate efforts, traces and versions of traces can be shared with a community of practice in a shared repository.

In his talk Martin will provide an overview of the Memento Tracer framework and take use cases of LANL’s “Scholarly Orphans” project to demonstrate its functionality to track, capture, and archive scholarly artifacts on the web. While our focus in this project is on archiving scholarly artifacts, Memento Tracer is applicable to any web resource and brings the most benefit for resources that are based on recognizable patterns. We invite the audience to try out the Tracer framework themselves via our demo system, provide feedback, and discuss further use cases.