2018-04-10 Statusmeeting

As part of the organizational changes at KB DK, Netarchive is now part of one department, the department for digital cultural heritage (head: Ditte Laursen). A group is working on integrating policies and strategies for all material belonging to digital cultural heritage.

A project group (two curators are part of the group) is working on a clarification of our future front end for archive users - (wayback version, full-text frontend etc.). An important point is the replay of pages with the https-protocol.

The event harvest for the collective negotiations on pay for public employees is ongoing as the negotiations are ongoing. The mediator has postponed potential strikes and lockouts. (In the event of a lockout there will be no active curation or support, but systems will not be shut down, and there will still be technical support for the storage backend.) We have got some input from curators at the workers museum – the most important for us is that they are very motivated, we look forward to future cooperation – with BCWeb.

We are setting up a pilot project for the use of BCWeb with archivists form a local archive on a specific event in the middle of June: https://folkemoedet.dk/en/

We are also in the process of hiring a full-time coordinator for the Netarchive organisation - among other tasks, the new hire is expected to represent Netarkivet in international fora and collaborations. We are looking for someone with a combination of relevant curatorial and technical skills and experience in project management.

As mentioned in previous updates last year, over the past months we have been working on our full-text indexing process and the search interface. Last week we opened access to the new version of our full-text search application "Archives de l'internet Labs", which is now integrated with the main interface. It has been updated with new graphics and new functions, in particular the grouping of identical URLs in search results. We have to thank Toke for his help with this, as we had real problems regarding performance when we applied this grouping to searches with large numbers of results - Toke advised us to deactivate in Solr the count of the number of groups generated (which we used to calculate the number of pages of results) and this made a huge improvement. We also tidied up the code of the application with a view to allowing its use by other institutions who use warc-indexer.

On the indexing side, the main objective of the project was to index our daily news crawl since its creation at the end of 2010; we originally aimed to index the period up to the end of 2016 but we were able to extend this to the end of 2017. This means we were also able to treat WARCs containing revisit records, which we have been producing since changing to Heritrix 3 last year. We worked with the community on the latest version of warc-indexer, in particular to define collection names based on W/ARC filenames, and therefore on the harvest definitions in NAS. The news crawl represented an increase in the amount of data indexed compared to the collections previously indexed (around 13 TB, compared to around 2.5 TB) and also in terms of the final index size, which roughly doubled to around 2.4 TB. To handle with this we also put in place a new infrastructure, and the performances are much better than out previous prototype, though we will aim to continue work on the configuration in future developments.

Work on the research project that is using the news crawl to study neologisms is ongoing. We are working with the research team to see if some of the analyses that they apply, such as Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modelling, can be included in our indexing and search systems.