A Framework for Aggregating Private and Public Web Archives

Efforts to preserve content on the public Web have been effective at ensuring our collective digital heritage is not lost. However, these efforts put priority on the collective’s judgement of importance, often neglecting to capture individuals’ content due to additional scale, appropriateness, and technical restrictions. Individuals that take it upon themselves to preserve what they respectively deem important are illequipped with the base knowledge and toolset to perform personal digital preservation to create private web archives. When a user is able to create private web archives, there is little guidance in integrating private web archives with public web archives for a consistent query to replicate the content as if on the medium where it originated. This body of work will provide the ability for individually aspiring personal web archivists, both those with technical knowledge of the medium and those without, a means of preserving content previously not preserved. A framework will be created, utilizing and amending standard archiving technologies and concepts, to allow controlled access of the web archives by the creator as well as account for the integration, aggregation, and migration of private web archives with private public web archives.