Web Archiving: Tools

There are several option for users with limited finances or technical expertise to web archive personal or other small collections. Below are a few options that are manageable by individuals without institutional or organizational support.

Wayback Machine

• Developed and maintained by the Internet Archive
• https://archive.org/web/
• The Wayback Machine can be as simple as a user adding a link to be archived. This is only available for sites that allows crawlers
• There is also API availability for user to build their own tools.

Webrecorder

• Open-source tools manufactured by webrecorder
• https://webrecorder.net/
• Webrecorder provides a suite of open source projects and tools to capture interactive websites and replay them at a later time as accurately as possible.
• Tools for capture: archiveweb.page, Chrome extension to archive pages; Tools for replay: replayweb.page, Browser-based web archive replay system
• Collaboration with them is encouraged! Email at info@webrecorder.net and/or join the forum at https://forum.webrecorder.net/

WARCreate

• Developed by Chrome
• http://warcreate.com/
• WARCreate is a Google Chrome extensions that can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store.
• This extension does not come with a player and the Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) is the recommended player for WARCs generated by the extension. 

Large-scale web archiving occurs at an organization or institutional level. Larger organizations have access to funding for subscription service or have a technical team with the expertise to install and manage software. Below are a few of the more commonly used tools.

Archive-It

• Developed by Internet Archive
• https://archive-it.org/

• Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service created for larger organizations.

Heretrix

• Developed by Internet Archive
• https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3/wiki
• Heretrix is an open-source web crawler project designed to respect the robots.txt and other exclusions.

MirrorWeb​

• Developed by MirrorWeb Limited
• https://www.mirrorweb.com/
• MirrorWeb is a non-academic subscription web archiving service that provides various resources for website archiving, social media archiving, and public archiving in both the public and private sector. This is not often used by academic or cultural heritage organizations at this time and they largely serve financial organizations.

Web Curator Tool

• Developed by the International Internet Preservation Consortium
• http://webcurator.sourceforge.net/
• "The Web Curator Tool is an open-source workflow management application for selective web archiving." It is designed for larger organizations to use but non-technical users can manage the application and web archives.