Archive of the National Széchényi Library’s websites

This small collection has established in the pilot web-archiving project of National Széchényi Library. It contains archived items from the online contents of the library. Majority of these websites were harvested in January or February 2019. It is important to know because some archiving software displaying the last modification date of the original website and not displaying the date of archiving correctly! The archived versions are often have errors and lack of content can appear. In this way, these archived copies are not substituting the original content services on the live web that can be found on the last column of the spreadsheet by clicking on the brown arrows. Our aim is to demonstrate the capabilities and limits of the current archiving and replaying tools, related to the different web technologies (for example HTML3, HTML5, JavaScript, Ajax, Java, Flash, PHP) and the various Content Management Systems (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, social media platforms). Archiving software products that we are using are the following: Heritrix, WCT, WAIL, Brozzler, HTTrack, Warcit, and Webrecorder. We are using the following display tools: OpenWayback, PyWb, SolrWayback and the online version of Webrecorder Player that can be found on the cloud at webrecorder.io address. The collection together with the materials from the demo archive can be searched by full text by the SolrWayback software.

Red arrows are showing that an archived item cannot be displayed entirely or just by a bad quality by the corresponding display software. Yellow buttons refers to navigation or display problems and to partial archived items. By clicking on the green icons, the archived item is appearing in a good quality, perhaps only with some minor mistakes (certainly some internal search functions, outgoing links and embedded content from external resources will not work either in these items). Sometimes the displaying software offers different archived versions of starting pages by the same date (for example in case of Facebook different archived pages before and after login). In case of an error, it is worth to click through all archived pages by the same date because perhaps not the first item refers to the correctly archived version. When we are using OpenWayback to display websites the header by the date of archiving must be closed if it is hiding the main menu or other important navigation item. The login, registration and other activity panels of social networking panels must be also closed because those are not working either in case of archived versions.

In order to make some comparisons the spreadsheet contains screenshots from the starting pages of the original websites that made by one or two weeks after the original archiving process. These are marked by blue arrow. Corresponding items from the Internet Archive can also be found marked by lilac arrow. Each link is opening on a new browser window. A metadata record describing the sub-collection itself is available here.

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