Introducing Reproducible Navigation of a Web Archive: SolrWayback Navigation Tracker

Web archives are an exhaustive source for humanities research.They are however, hard to navigate and research with material from web archives is often opaque as no existing software for exploring web archives provide researcher with the possibility to track their pathways around the archive.This paper presents an extension of the Open-Source software SolrWayback, which provides researchers with a navigation tracking feature that supports a more reproducible and transparent methodology for documenting how a web archive collection has been explored as part of research.The functionality has been developed from a user-and test-driven approach, where the needs of contemporary historians have decided how the feature was implemented.This user-centred approach provides new functionality for a piece of software that has primarily been developed by archiving institutions. Plain Language SummaryThis paper introduces a feature in a web archiving software that can be used to track which parts of an archived collection have been consulted during a research process.This is a feature often seen in other information retrieval systems, such as library systems or archival databases; however, it has not been present in web archive systems before implemented here.The purpose of the navigation tracker is to make it possible for users of the web archiving software to save their exploration pathways through a collection and be able to document how they have navigated a collection of archived websites.In general, web archiving software has previously been developed with curators of collections in mind.The feature presented in this paper has been developed through a user test where historians used the software for exploring sources related to their research.By letting historians test the functionality, the paper ensures that the feature developed has a use case in humanities research.The paper and the feature that it presents make it possible to document and store how a user has navigated a web archive collection.This feature can be used for multiple purposes.First, it provides researchers with the possibility of taking up their research where they left off earlier, as it can be hard to re-find sources if the archive does not provide them with a way of tracking which parts of the archive they have investigated.Furthermore, the feature provides a "paper trail" of which parts of an archive have been consulted as part of the research process.Having knowledge of which parts of an archive have been consulted as part of a research process is vital for future historians wanting to conduct related research.The feature implemented here provides a way to capture that information so that it can be saved for future reference.