Cultivating open-access through innovative services 14:00-14:30

Fernando Melo & Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt at FCCN-FCT

Arquivo.pt preserves more than 4 billion files in several languages preserved from the web since 1996 and provides a public search service that enables open-access to this information. The service provides user interfaces for textual, URL and advanced search. It also provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enable fast development of value-added applications over the preserved information by third-parties.

However, the constant evolution of the web and of society demands constant development of a web archive to follow its pace of evolution and maintain the accessibility of the preserved content. Thus, creating a new mobile version and improving our APIs were mandatory steps to support broad open access to our collections.

In November 2017, Arquivo.pt launched a new mobile version. The main novelty was the adaptation of user interfaces to mobile devices and preservation of the mobile web. In order to achieve responsive and mobile-friendly user interfaces for Arquivo.pt we had to address questions such as:

Who wants to view archived web pages on such a small device?
Should we replay archived web pages on mobile web pages inside an iframe or full screen?
What additional services/functionalities can we add to a mobile version?
Should we privilege the replay of older archived web pages, or newer responsive ones?
How can we show an extensive list of archived versions of a given URL in such a small device?
In order to facilitate automatic access to our full-text search capabilities we decided to release a new text search API in JSON. One can perform automatic queries from a simple word search, to more complex ones such as finding all archived web pages from a given site that contain a text expression in a certain time range.

We would like to present this new API, and show how anyone can easily integrate their work with our preserved information.

Despite the challenges, it is very gratifying to develop an open-access web archive, which can reach a large audience of users and researchers. Arquivo.pt reached 100 000 users for the first time in 2017, and there was a significant increase of research projects using Arquivo.pt as a source of information.