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When expectations meet reality: common misconceptions about web archives and challenges for scholars

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Abstract

As the study of digital history, politics, and culture emerges as an academic discipline, web archives will play a valuable role as sources of information. Those wishing to engage with web archives will need both specific technical skills and a high-level understanding of how the web works. This paper examines the nature and type of misconceptions that web archivists form when they create and utilise web archives. In order to carry out this research, the author qualitatively analyzed support tickets submitted by web archivists using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It (AIT), the most popular web archiving service. The tickets comprised 2544 interactions between web archivists and AIT support specialists. This paper describes the expectations AIT users bring to web archives, and the differences between their expectations and the realities of the web archiving process. It identifies the most prominent misconceptions AIT users have about both web archives and the web itself, analyses the challenges these misconceptions can pose for researchers, and recommends ways in which these can be addressed.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Lori Donovan and Jefferson Bailey of the Internet Archive, without whose help this research would not have been possible.

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  1. School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta, 11210 87 Ave, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Brenda Reyes Ayala

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  1. Brenda Reyes Ayala
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Correspondence to Brenda Reyes Ayala.

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Ayala, B.R. When expectations meet reality: common misconceptions about web archives and challenges for scholars. Int J Digit Humanities 2, 89–106 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-021-00034-3

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