Why WAIL?

Motivation

Building personal or unique collections of web archives is challenging, especially when it comes to archiving what a user sees at an instant. The tools required to build web archive collections may not be available for an individual because they require time consuming set up and or complex configurations after set up to initiate the archiving process.

The tools used in the web archiving process typically consist of a web crawler (to gather large sets of web pages and their embedded resources) and a means to access the web archives (to view the archived content). In a standard institutional archiving setup, the archival crawler Heritrix is used and the access tool used to view the archives generated by Heritrix is OpenWayback. Both of these tools can be a daunting task for an individual to set up.

Purpose

• Bridge the gap between institutional and individual archiving tools.
• Provide collection-based Web archiving without reliance on subscription based services
• Streamline the process of creating and viewing web archives.
• Simplify the configuration of the archiving tools.