The Internet Memory Foundation (formerly the European Archive Foundation) was a non-profitable

foundation Foundation may refer to: * Foundation (nonprofit), a type of charitable organization ** Foundation (United States law), a type of charitable organization in the U.S. ** Private foundation, a charitable organization that, while serving a good cause ...

whose purpose was

archiving An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

content of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. It supported projects and research that included the preservation and protection of digital media content in various forms to form a

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

of cultural content. As of August 2018, it was defunct.

History

The non-profit institution European Archive Foundation was incorporated in 2004 in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

. An announcement at the opening of the Cross Media Week in Amsterdam during September 2006 included a quote from Brewster Kahle, who founded the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

. Julien Masanès was its first director. Operating from Amsterdam and

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

, it said it would make freely accessible

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

collections and web archives. Masanès, previously at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, edited a book on

Web archiving Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated captur ...

in 2007. The Paris organization is called Internet Memory Research, which operates a service known as ArchiveTheNet. In December 2010, the Foundation changed its name to Internet Memory Foundation to express its goal of preserving internet content for current and future generations. The foundation had many partners, including cultural institutions and research institutions, who collaborated on its web archiving projects. These partners included

UK National Archives , type = Non-ministerial department , seal = , nativename = , logo = Logo_of_The_National_Archives_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg , logo_width = 150px , logo_caption = , formed = , preceding1 = , dissolved = , superseding = , juris ...

, the

Max Planck Institute Max or MAX may refer to: Animals * Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog * Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE) * Max (gorilla) ...

Technische Universität Berlin The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

, and the

Institut Mines-Télécom Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) is a French public academic institution dedicated to Higher Education and Research for Innovation in the fields of engineering and digital technology, organized as a Collegiate University. Created in 1996, it was o ...

. The foundation was also a member of the

International Internet Preservation Consortium The International Internet Preservation Consortium is an international organization of libraries and other organizations established to coordinate List of Web archiving initiatives, efforts to preserve internet content for the future. It was found ...

Research

The foundation was involved in research projects to improve technologies of

web crawling A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...

data extraction Data extraction is the act or process of retrieving data out of (usually unstructured or poorly structured) data sources for further data processing or data storage ( data migration). The import into the intermediate extracting system is thus usua ...

text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

, and preservation to support the growth and use of web archives. Their projects were funded by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

through the Seventh Research Framework Program. * Scalable Preservation Environments (SCAPE, Project No. 270137) ran from February 2011 through July 2014. It was developing an open source, scalable preservation platform. * Large-scale, Cross-lingual Trend Mining and Summarization of Real-time Media Streams (TrendMiner, Project No. 287863) ran from November 2011 through October 2014. It aimed to develop tools to mine social media, especially across multiple languages. * Collect-All ARchives to COmmunity MEMories (ARCOMEM, Project No. 270239) ran from January 2011 through December 2013. It studied the preservation of ephemeral web information, such as that used in

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

sites. * Web Archiving in Europe survey ran in December 2010. It assessed the state of web archiving projects across different European institutions. * Longitudinal Analytics of Web Archive data (LAWA, Project No. 258105) ran from September 2010 through August 2013. The project experimented with large-scale data analytics for use in the

Future Internet Research and Experimentation Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) is a program funded by the European Union to do research on the Internet, its prospects, and its future, a field known as "future Internet". History Some researchers met with government official ...

project. * LivingKnowledge (Project No. 231126) ran from February 2009 through January 2012. The goal was to improve navigation and search in large multimodal datasets. * Living Web Archives (LiWA, Project No. 216267) ran from February 2008 through January 2011. LiWA developed web archiving methods and tools that aimed to capture a more accurate, "living" archive of the web.

Collections

Audio and video

Before focusing on web archiving, the European Archive Foundation had collected one of the largest online free classical music collections (more than 800 pieces, from Mozart to Dvorak) and Public Information Films from the British Government, made in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the UK National Archives.

Selective web collection

The foundation archived a snapshot of the EU Institutions websites, made in collaboration with the

Historical Archives of the European Union The Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU), located in Florence (Italy), is the official archives for the historical documents of the Institutions of the European Union. It is also a research centre dedicated to the archival preservation a ...

located in Italy, an archive of political websites of the 25 EU member states, captured during the European constitutional debate, and archives (among others): *

The National Archives (United Kingdom) , type = Non-ministerial department , seal = , nativename = , logo = Logo_of_The_National_Archives_of_the_United_Kingdom.svg , logo_width = 150px , logo_caption = , formed = , preceding1 = , dissolved = , superseding = , juris ...

National Library of Ireland The National Library of Ireland (NLI; ga, Leabharlann Náisiúnta na hÉireann) is the Republic of Ireland's national library located in Dublin, in a building designed by Thomas Newenham Deane. The mission of the National Library of Ireland i ...

* CERN, Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire (Switzerland) *

Parliament of the United Kingdom The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the supreme legislative body of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories. It meets at the Palace of Westminster, London. It alone possesses legislative suprema ...

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) is situated in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is a division within the Engaged Communities Group of the Department for Communities (DfC). The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland is disti ...

The Web crawler used by the project was

Heritrix Heritrix is a web crawler designed for web archiving. It was written by the Internet Archive. It is available under a free software license and written in Java. The main interface is accessible using a web browser, and there is a command-line too ...

version 3. Heritrix generates resources stored in a standardised archiving "container" format, the ARC file (.arc). The ARC file was extended to the

Web ARChive The Web ARChive (WARC) archive format specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archive file together with related information. The WARC format is a revision of the Internet Archive's ARC_IA File Format that ...

file format (.warc), which was approved as an international standard in June 2009 (current edition ISO 28500:2017).

References

External links

* * EC-funded research projects: :
Living Knowledge
:
LAWA
Longitudinal Analytics of Web Archive Data :
ARCOMEM
European Archives, Museums and Libraries in the Age of the Social Web :
SCAPE
Scalable Preservation Environments :
LiWA
Living Web Archives {{Authority control Information technology organizations based in Europe Non-profit organisations based in the Netherlands Web archiving Web archiving initiatives European Union and science and technology