Funding for cultural institutions has been a constant uphill battle for decades. No matter the organization’s size, from small community archives to local public libraries and even larger national libraries and universities, we have all encountered similar funding challenges. Thankfully, budget cuts and limited staff support have not stopped archivists, librarians, and web archivists from creating new pathways forward. Archivists across the globe continue to take unique approaches to maximize budgets to cover costs for various archives initiatives, especially web archiving.

As communities continue to create and publish content online, the scope of web archiving initiatives has grown. But even with funding challenges, budget cuts, and staffing uncertainty, our wide range of users in the Webrecorder community are tapping into our robust resources and tools. 

Our Full Suite of Tools

Since 2014, Webrecorder has been committed to developing a full suite of tools to empower users across the globe to archive, curate, and replay content captured on the web. Our team continues to create, update, and prioritize providing multiple access points for users to capture complex, and interactive content on the web – including dynamic websites, social media platforms, and content behind paywalls.

We encourage you to take advantage of our various tools to accomplish your web archiving goals; no matter your budget, we have solutions accessible to you: 

• Browsertrix Hosted Service is our browser-based, high-fidelity crawling tool, with innovative quality assurance and collaborative organization that empowers users to preserve, curate, and share archived web content confidently. Users can curate and publish unlimited collections, capture content behind paywalls/logins, and work collaboratively on the same multi-user platform. Whether you invite your organization and colleagues as Admin, Crawlers, or viewers, our tool is designed to encourage collaborative workflows bringing departments out of silos. You can access a free 7-day trial here. 

  • People can also access the open source code to deploy Browsertrix locally and connect directly with users worldwide in the Webrecorder forum online.

• ArchiveWeb.page is a free Google Chrome browser extension that allows users to create high-fidelity web archives directly in their browser. When enabled, ArchiveWeb.page will record the network traffic on a given tab and store the data in the browser for later viewing. Archives created with ArchiveWeb.page can be viewed from right within the app or using Webrecorder’s free ReplayWeb.page viewer. Files can be exported in standard WARC and WACZ formats.

• ReplayWeb.page is a free, browser-based tool that allows users to view archived items. Features also include full text search, Flash support, and Google Drive support.

• pywb, the oldest of Webrecorder’s tools, is a free and open source web archive replay system, or “wayback machine”. At its core, pywb provides a calendar-based interface for exploring and replaying web archive collections. It also includes some related functionality, such as a recording mode for creating web archives, as well as a proxy mode for serving web archives. More information on pywb’s features can be found in the documentation.

If you are an organization or individual archivist that needs support, feel free to send an email to info@webrecorder.org. If you’d like access to our pricing plans for larger crawling projects, schedule a meeting with us here.

You can also explore our Resources page for more information on our tools, forums, presentations, and publications about Webrecorder!

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