We are no longer accepting submissions for the 2025 Web Archiving Conference.
Towards Best Practices in Web Archiving
We invite submissions that focus on good practices for all aspects of web archiving.
As the web archiving community has grown and matured, we have gained substantial experience from collecting, preserving, and providing access to web archives. Sharing our collective knowledge is crucial for moving forward, advancing practice, and creating standards and procedures across borders and institutions. This helps to ensure that web archives are consistent, sustainable, and accessible for the long term.
Every aspect of the web archive ecosystem can benefit from best practices, including curation, tools development, long-term preservation, discovery and access. Use cases of increasing interest in web archiving, such as preparing data for research or machine learning purposes and ensuring efficiency and ecological sustainability, may benefit from tried approaches and workflows. In contrast, recurring issues, such as complying with ethical and legal restrictions or acquiring legacy materials, may differ widely depending on the geographic location. These diverse perspectives have value and move us closer to more expansive, better-documented and more accessible collections that are sustainably maintained, easily discoverable and searchable by users.
We further highlight the importance of lessons learned from transnational and cross-institutional collaborations, strategies for advocacy for inclusive collections, engagement with internal and external stakeholders, as well as education and training of future users. We welcome short presentations showcasing research use cases, especially those involving partnerships between researchers and web archiving institutions.
Through the way we curate; build collections; engage with, represent, and advocate for users; improve tools and access; leverage data for machine learning; and practice sustainability, we can increase the impact of our collections. By focusing on sharing good practices and lessons learned, we also encourage reflections on how we can better realize the potential of web archives. Best practices are often associated with success. However, a crucial part of developing best practices involves gaining insights from both our own and others’ mistakes. In addition to stories about successes, we welcome presentations that share lessons learned from failures and setbacks.
The following topics within five broad themes are intended to help formulate ideas for submissions and are not intended to limit proposals for other topics:
CURATION & COLLECTIONS
- Developing collecting scopes, including range, depth and frequency, challenges, and sustainability
- How to identify and include under-represented content in our collections
- Guidelines for curating social media and dynamic content
- Handling the collection of harmful content, "fake news", and polarizing viewpoints
- Adopting CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) for Indigenous data
- Current practices in creating documentation
- Guidelines for acquiring legacy materials and methods for reconstructing old websites
- Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate metadata and classify content
TOOLS & INFRASTRUCTURE
- Towards long-term sustainability and preservation of open source tools
- Overcoming harvesting challenges
- Methods and guidelines for capturing social media
- Workflows for migrating from outdated systems and infrastructure
- Efficient and sustainable storage of web archives
- Storage and access of web archive metadata
- Leveraging QA process and results to inform tool development
- Strategies for applications of AI to improve harvests, quality assurance, etc.
IMPROVING DISCOVERY & ACCESS
- Towards best practices for search and discovery
- Web archive collections as data
- Providing access for reuse of collections and datasets
- Current practices for reproducibility, workflows, and research data management
- Aligning with good research data practices, such as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), Persistent Identifiers, and open licenses
- Cleaning and facilitating data for the purpose of machine learning/AI
- Documenting standard format transformations in the web archiving space
ADVOCACY & USER ENGAGEMENT
- Strategies for engagement of internal and external stakeholders
- Showcasing collaborations between researchers and web archivists
- Strategies for advocacy for inclusive collections
- Using web archives in research: current state and future needs
- Lessons learned from transnational and cross-institutional collaborations
- Educating and training future end-users
- Best practices in developing AI models using web archives through collaborations or partnerships
- Legal and ethical frameworks for the application of machine learning to web and social media archives
TOWARDS ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE WEB ARCHIVING
- Calculating environmental costs of running a web archiving program
- Reducing the carbon footprint of your web archive
- Greener long-term preservation of web archive materials
- Sustainable data management (virtualization, decentralization)
TIMELINE
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CFP open |
2 July 2024 |
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CFP closes |
18 September 2024 |
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Notifications issued |
By 1 November 2024 |
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Registration Opens |
15 November 2024 |
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Draft Program Ready |
13 January 2025 |
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Registration closes |
26 March 2025 |
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WAC in-person |
9-10 April 2025 |
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All proposals must be written in English and submitted via ConfTool. In addition to the submission-specific requirements below, proposals should outline how their contribution advances the understanding of topics related to the conference theme, how it relates to previous work (if applicable), and what impact it may have on the conference attendees. All proposals should be accompanied by 3 to 5 keywords. The Program Committee welcomes and encourages submissions from first-time attendees and/or first-time presenters.
15-minute presentations with 5-minute Q&A
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
- Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.
Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the presentation author(s)
- Name(s) of presenters during the live session.
60-minute panels
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words
- Must include:
- Title and panel description
- 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation(s) of the panel proposer(s)
- Name(s) of panelists during the live session and the moderator
- Examples of the questions that will be discussed by the panelists
- If presentations will be included, short abstracts for each of the presentations
Please make sure to allocate a minimum of 30 minutes for the discussion.
Please note that multiple panelists cannot be from the same institution.
60-80 minute workshops and tutorials
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words
- Must include information about coordinator(s), format (workshop or tutorial), target audience, anticipated number of participants, and technical requirements
- Must include details about expected learning outcome(s)
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
Posters with accompanying 1-minute lightning talks
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
- Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.
Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the poster author(s)
- Name(s) of presenters during the live session.
5-minute lightning talks
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
- Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.
Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the author(s)
- Name(s) of presenters during the live lightning talk session.
5-minute lightning talks presenting web archiving use cases
This format is for research uses of web archives, particularly if they involve partnerships between researchers and web archiving institutions.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
- Must include 3-5 keywords
- Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.
Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the author(s)
- Name(s) of presenters during the live lightning talk session.
All submissions are due before September 18th (AoE / UTC-12) 2024.
The program committee will review all submissions and send out notifications of acceptance/rejection by the end of October. For questions, please send an email to events[at]netpreserve.org.