“Where Did the Web Archive Go?”, 2021-08-12 (; backlinks; similar):
To perform a longitudinal investigation of web archives and detecting variations and changes replaying individual archived pages, or mementos, we created a sample of 16,627 mementos from 17 public web archives.
Over the course of our 14-month study (November, 2017—January, 2019), we found that 4 web archives changed their base URIs and did not leave a machine-readable method of locating their new base URIs, necessitating manual rediscovery.
Of the 1,981 mementos in our sample from these 4 web archives, 537 were impacted: 517 mementos were rediscovered but with changes in their time of archiving (or Memento-Datetime), HTTP status code, or the string comprising their original URI (or URI-R), and 20 of the mementos could not be found at all.
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