Web Archiving and Historical Research

Abstract

Born digital content offers a more detailed and complete record of the present than what traditional sources provided of the past. The first section of this paper surveys current efforts and technologies to capture the present digital universe and reflects on the limitations of current web archives. The first attempts to archive the Hungarian web were made in 2017 in the National Széchényi Library, Budapest. The second part explores how this content could be harnessed for historical research, and how it will become the principal source of our recent past. The authors point out how web archives, and the resulting scale of data, will require new strategies and methodologies to deal with born digital sources effectively. They also show that born digital sources will also make it possible to pursue new types of inquiries that yield new results.