What can tiny, transparent GIFs from the 1990s teach us about the future of access and use of web archives? 15:30-16:00

Grace Thomas & Trevor Owens, Library of Congress

With petabytes of WARC files containing billions of archived resources from the web, it is often difficult to know where to start in researching web archives. For this paper, we started with the simplest kind of resource possible: the single-pixel, transparent GIF. Commonly known as spacer” GIFs, single-pixel transparent GIFs were used to format web pages before the advent of styling with CSS or JavaScript, among serving other functions.

While the size and invisible nature of this particular resource make it seem insignificant, single-pixel, transparent GIFs were an integral element of early web design. Their presence in web archives studied over time lends insight into the history of the web and can inform our future ability to come to understand our digital past.

For this case study, we decided to use a small, curated set of single-pixel GIF’s featured in Olia Lialina’s 2013 online art exhibit based on the GeoCities archive. In the exhibit, the ten transparent GIFs, two of which no longer resolve, are wrapped in frames and set against a tropical backdrop to show that, although invisible, they still take up space. We first assigned a digital fingerprint to the ten GIFs by computing an MD-5 cryptographic hash for each file discovering that, out of the original ten, there were only seven distinct files. We then used this unique identifier to search for the earliest appearances of the final seven files in the Library of Congress web archive and Internet Archive, respectively. In turn, Andy Jackson generously worked to trace the seven GIFs throughout the UK Web Archive, which resulted in fascinating trends over time.

Our study is key in beginning to understand how single-pixel GIFs were used across the web over time. However, we intend to present the paper, not only as a study of one resource, but also how the study of a singular resource revealed many more aspects of archiving and usage of born-digital materials. We will share our conclusions about hashing as a method of studying resources in the web archive, as well as skepticism of results being indicative of the true” live web at the time of archiving versus revealing collection practices. Additionally, we will express our call for more comprehensive notes on scoping and crawling decisions, content processing of an organization’s own web archive by its archivists, and the value of multiple web archiving initiatives collecting the same websites.