Weblog archives: Achieving the recordness of Web archiving

Several national libraries have extended their digital collection to Web publication. Notable Web archiving projects include the Pandora project of the National Library of Australia and the Minerva project of the Library of Congress. However, close examination of their collection policies reveals that little is required of archiving Weblogs. This is despite the fact that volume of Weblog publication is fast growing at a rate estimated to be 12,000 new Weblogs a day. According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, 27% of the entire internet users are also Weblog users. This trend suggests that the existing collection policies need to be reexamined. More significantly, contrary to obstacles faced by Website and E-mail archives, we discover Weblog to be an e medium that is conducive to record keeping principles. Specifically, Weblog allows its context, structure, and content to be easily definable. This implies that it is more straightforward to appraise the Weblog and establish its authenticity. We shall elaborate on it in the following: first, Weblog is anchored and moderated by one, or a small group, of actors. The actors' profiles are normally detailed within the Weblog itself. Weblog allows commentators to post their comments; this re-enforces a gate-keeping mechanism where the moderator and commentators can easily engage in a dialogic discourse, if necessary, that clarify the information. Weblog also automatically stores its current, as well as historical, postings in chronological order; as such each posting is "encaputalated" in the context when it is created. Second, unlike Emails and newsgroups, the structure of the posting is easily traceable, as it is implemented solely via hyperlink mechanism. The chronological storage feature also allows the evolution of the hyperlinks to be recorded over time, which is almost impossible for Website archives. As a result, there exists a wealth of research in the ACM community on "Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics." It demonstrates how automatic analysis of the hyperlink structure done by computers can reveal, among other things, the clustering of microcommunities. Last, but not the least, from content's point of view, Weblog documents the contemporary thoughts and actions of the persons in a culture. In a study by Nardi and collaborators at Stanford, it listed reasons why people blogs, including to document one's personal thoughts, life and through the process, to engage others in a community forum. It is also worth noting that research of a discourse as serious as presidential election can be facilitated by analyzing Weblogs; as it is reported by BlogPulse senior researcher Natalie Glance in her publication: The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog. To sum up, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the record-ness of Weblog as described above, using examples from our project on Asian Tsunami Web Sphere (http://tsunami.archive.org). At the end, we argue that Weblog can be established as a primary, organic, as well as trust-worthy, source of information, given that due archival inspection is applied, which in turn, is facilitated by its record properties.