title: Symmetrical Web Archiving With Webrecorder
creators: Dragan Espenschied Ilya Kreymer
abstract: This paper describes a workshop for the novel, open source web archiving tool Webrecorder. Until now, web archiving has mainly been thought to be synonymous with “spidering” or “crawling,” meaning that a very basic, simulated version of a web browser travels paths of links and storing what it encounters, based on a certain set of rules. Webrecorder introduces a new web archiving concept, symmetrical archiving, which makes use of actual browsers and actual user behavior to archive the web, as well. The software stack used for accessing or replaying archived material is exactly the same as during the capturing process. This allows for unprecedented fidelity in web archiving, , enabling the preservation of items embedded complex, dynamic web applications, while keeping their whole, interactive context as well as any user specific content. This new approach to web archiving requires new ways of working within institutions; the proposed workshop serves as an introduction to symmetrical archiving, using Webrecorder’s emulation-based browsers, defining object boundaries, and transitioning from or augmenting crawler-based archives.