Conceptualizing aggregate-level description in web archives

Abstract

Web archives collections are often excluded from archival science discussions, and their description instead focuses on bibliographic approaches to item-level metadata. This article argues that web archives are best understood using approaches of archival description, focusing on a case study of the Danish Netarchive, a long-running national web archive. By capturing and preserving web sites for the purposes of legal deposit, the Netarchive creates and maintains historical records of the web. Examining the Netarchive’s systems and activities through the lens of archival representation, this article develops a typology of representational artifacts that support this work, including the use of database entities, wiki documentation, classification and management via Jira issues, and codes, identifiers, and structures embedded in network protocols themselves. The analysis considers how meaningful aggregations can be understood via these representational schemes, systems and architectures, and how the nature of born-networked records challenges concepts of singular, hierarchical orderings of records aggregations. The closing discussion proposes new modes of description that address these multiple interconnected systems, and raises questions about what this might mean for aggregate-level description in the context of digital and born-networked records more broadly.