Assignment - Week 6

The goal of this assignment is to get you started creating your own web collections and to compare the different tools that you can use to create collections. (See my South Louisiana Flood - 2016 collection as an example.)

Pick a topic that you care about and choose 15 URIs to “seed” your collection.

Create collections (with the same 15 seeds) using the following tools:

• Archive-It
• webrecorder.io
• WAIL
• WARCreate / WAIL – use WARCreate to create the WARCs and import them into WAIL (a separate collection from your native WAIL collection)

Make sure that you have a mix of seeds – some that are appropriate for page-only archiving and some that are appropriate for deeper crawling.

Create at least one capture of each seed per week.

Due Next Week (Oct 11)

Create an html page in your forked github repository that lists your 15 seeds (link to the live web) and contains links to your collections in webrecorder.io and Archive-It.

Due in 3 Weeks (Oct 25) - updated

Create a report (Markdown, PDF, etc.) in your forked github repository that describes your experience creating your collection with the four different tools. Compare and contrast the tools in terms of capture quality, ease of use, etc.

In particular, for each tool list

• advantages
• disadvantages
  • include at least one screenshot where the tool did not capture all of a page’s resources (if applicable)
• situations or types of pages where you’d recommend this tool over the others
  • include at least one screenshot of where the tool captured a page better than the other tools (if applicable)

Finally, reflect upon your collection. Were 15 seeds enough to characterize the topic you wanted to cover? How could someone use your collection in the future? Identify (include screenshots and links) at least one resource that changed over the time you were collecting.

Be prepared to discuss this in class (no more than 5 mins).