Republishing IIPC Collections Through Alternative Interfaces
Through the Content Development Group, the IIPC has for several years been harvesting thematic web archive collections, curated by participating member institutions as a collaborative effort. These collections, which span topics such as online news, World War One Commemoration, the Olympic Games, and the Covid-19 pandemic, are made available through a conventional wayback interface via the Archive-It service. Recognizing the value of the collections as research datasets, earlier in 2021, the IIPC and Bibliotheca Alexandrina started working together to experiment with the idea of republishing the collections through alternative access interfaces, hosted at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, that offer added functionality beyond conventional web archive playback to accommodate research use cases. These alternative interfaces are, namely, SolrWayback, which offers a variety of search functionalities to supplement basic web archive retrieval, and LinkGate, which offers a temporal graph visualization interface into a web archive. (Both SolrWayback and LinkGate are developed by IIPC member institutions.) In this presentation, we report on what has been accomplished so far, go through a light technical overview of integrating the collections and republishing through SolrWayback and LinkGate, and show examples from the republished collections to demonstrate the additional functionality offered by the alternative access paradigms.