Abstract. Web archives and Digital Libraries are conceptually similar, as they both store and provide access to digital contents. The process of loading documents into a Digital Library usually requires a strong intervention from human experts. However, large collections of documents gathered from the web must be loaded without human intervention. This paper analyzes strategies to select contents for a national web archive and proposes a system architecture to support it. 1 1

Abstract. This paper argues that the growing importance of the World Wide Web means that Web sites are key candidates for digital preservation. After an brief outline of some of the main reasons why the preservation of Web sites can be problematic, a review of selected Web archiving initiatives shows that most current initiatives are based on combinations of three main approaches: automatic harvesting, selection and deposit. The paper ends with a discussion of issues relating to collection and access policies, software, costs and preservation. 1

The Internet has turned into an important aspect of our information infrastructure and society, with the Web forming a part of our cultural heritage. Several initiatives thus set out to preserve it for the future. The resulting Web archives are by no means only a collection of historic Web pages. They hold a wealth of information that waits to be exploited, information that may be substantial to a variety of disciplines. With the time-line and metadata available in such a Web archive, additional analyzes that go beyond mere information exploration become possible. In the context of the Austrian On-Line Archive (AOLA), we established a Data Warehouse as a key to this information. The Data Warehouse makes it possible to analyze a variety of characteristics of the Web in a flexible and interactive manner using on-line analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. Specifically, technological aspects such as operating systems and Web servers used, the variety of file types, forms or scripting languages encountered, as well as the link structure within domains, may be used to infer characteristics of technology maturation and impact or community structures.

The context in which digital objects are created, modified, or used is essential for the interpretation of information entities, for retrieval settings, for establishing their authenticity, as well as ensuring appropriate use. Therefore, determining this context of creation and use of digital objects is an essential task for many areas and applications, from (huge) digital library settings to end-user applications such as search. However, context is notoriously difficult and laboursome to establish and document, and when it has to be entered and maintained manually by the creator of the digital objects, it is often missing or partially incomplete or incorrect. Thus, this paper proposes an approach to (semi-) automatically determine the context of creation and usage of digital objects. Various facets of context along different dimensions are automatically detected, and are combined in pivot-table inspired views, at multiple levels of granularity, which then allow the extraction of the most appropriate connections to other digital objects. Finally, this contact can be used for a range of applications, such as search and navigation. 1.