Are you involved in a web development project that is changing frequently, that might disappear, or that you would like to deposit as part of your thesis or dissertation? Did you know that you can easily archive it using an open-source solution that respects standards and is rapidly becoming an accepted method of capture?

Rhizome’s Webrecorder allows for easy hi-fidelity capture and playback and the option to share archived websites. Webrecorder has a quick-start user guide that can help you to create a Web Archive (WARC) file, download it, and play it back on your desktop before possibly including it as part of a submission to Academic Works.

Unlike traditional web crawlers, such as Heritrix (which feeds the Internet Archive), Webrecorder is not currently an automated solution. This means that you will need to manually browse and play each page, video, and audio clip you want captured, so you might desire to merely capture a representative sampling of your site’s content rather than the entire site.

A distinct advantage of Webrecorder is the quick and easy ability to self-archive. If you create a free user account and log in, every session in which you record web content is automatically saved to that account. Even if you don’t log in, you can download your current session to your computer as a WARC file.

Webrecorder is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Knight Foundation, as well as Google and the Google Cultural Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. It’s a current project under continuous development, which means it will (probably) continue to improve. Stay tuned!

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