Reading Rooms for the Archived Web

Archives de Bevaix by Service intercommunal d’archivage The Wayback Machine is (usually) good at preserving web pages, but it’s not always good at helping you find your way around what’s been preserved. URLs from a vanished website may be archived, but if the original site is gone, the paths into it (its navigation, its search, its tables of contents) are sometimes gone too. This creates a need, and opportunity, for sites I want to call reading rooms for the archived web: standalone sites that sit to the side of archived web content and provide the index, browse, search and curation layers that the original site used to, with provenance links back to the captures they’re drawn from. The metaphor I have in mind is the reading room in a brick & mortar archive, the place you go to consult a collection, with finding aids close at hand and the records themselves a request slip away. Perhaps a finding aid is the better metaphor here? The most recent example of this I’ve come across is work…