Web Archiving: Opportunities and Challenges of Client-Side Playback

Historically, the complexities of the backend infrastructures needed to play back and embed rich web archives on a website have limited how we explore, showcase and tell stories with the archived web. Client-side playback is an exciting emerging technology that lifts a lot of those restraints.

The replayweb.page software suite developed by our long-time partner Webrecorder is, to date, the most advanced client-side playback technology available, allowing for the easy embedding of rich web archive playbacks on a website without the need for a complex backend infrastructure. However, entirely delegating to the browser the responsibility of downloading, parsing, and restituting web archives also means transferring new responsibilities to the client, which comes with its own set of challenges.

In this post, we’ll reflect on our experience deploying replayweb.page on Perma.cc and provide general security, performance and practical recommendations on how to embed web archives on a website using client-side playback.

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2021 Research Associates

Like most things at LIL, our visiting researcher program has taken many forms over the years. This year, despite our team being spread across the East and Midwest Coasts (shout out to Lake Michigan) we were thrilled to welcome five research associates to the virtual LILsphere, to explore their interests through the lens of our projects and mission.

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Interface Upgrade | Integrating Queries into Search and Case View

With expanded feature capabilities, users may find writing these queries to be more difficult, especially as researchers increase the complexity of their investigations. To make usage easier, we have integrated the Trends query language into the Search and Case View features. From a search query, users can click the Trends button, upon which our servers will automatically convert an existing query into a Trends timeline.

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New Feature | Flexible Citation Queries

Expand your ability to visualize citation practices with the latest support added to our Trends tool. Trends now supports flexible queries of how cases cite other cases in addition to the other ways in which cases can be filtered. By appending the name of any acceptable filter parameter to cites_to__{parameter name here}, users can retrieve all cases citing to cases matching said filter. The parameter name, like before, can be any parameter accepted by the Cases API.

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Feature Update | Extension of Trend Search Capability

Today, we are announcing an update to the Caselaw Access Project (CAP) API and Trends tool to help users better investigate changes in the law over time. These new features enable users to easily generate timelines of cases and explore patterns in case citations. We hope that they can help researchers uncover new insights about American caselaw.

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