Web Archive Manager (WAM)
The Web Archive Manager (WAM) is part of the toolkit to aid researchers in working with web archives.
WAM allows you to organise, replay, and annotate your archive files (.wacz or .warc). You can also use WAM to scrape data into structured formats.
WAM is developed by QUT Digital Observatory, as part of the Australian Internet Observatory (AIO). AIO received co-investment (doi.org/10.3565/hjrp-b141) from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) through the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons. The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
Please share your feedback by emailing us at digitalobservatory@qut.edu.au.
Installation
Getting started
In WAM, you manage web archives by projects. A default project already exists when you start the application.
Importing archives
To import archives into your project, select File > Import archives. Only files with .warc and wacz extensions are accepted.
If the archives are imported successfully, you will see them in the right table.
Replaying archives
To replay an imported archive, select the archive and click Replay.
Once in the replay view, you will see a list of recorded pages. If a page is recorded multiple times, you will see all of them in this list. To view only the latest version, tick Deduplicate pages.
To replay a page, simply click on the page. To go back to the page list, click Back to List.
Adding metadata
In addition to web archive’s standard metadata, You can annotate your archives by adding custom metadata.
To view the archive’s existing data, in the archive view, select an archive and click Edit metadata.
The standard metadata are file name, the timestamp when the archive is created, the file size. These cannot be changed or removed.
To add tags to an archive, select the tags row, and click Edit.
Ideally, a tag should contain no spaces or other special characters, except for hyphen (“-”) and underscores (“_“). If you want to add multiple tags, separate each one with a comma and no space.
Once you have added or edited the tags, click Add. You might have to click the tags row again for the updates to show.
Adding new custom metadata
To add new custom metadata, click Add metadata. You will need to specify a title for the metadata, and the value.
Naming conventions for metadata titles
Metadata titles are case sensitive, meaning metadataTitle and metadatatitle will be taken as two different things.
No spaces or special characters are allowed. The only special character you can use is @.
Standard metadata such as file, timestamp, size, and tags are reserved, so if you try to add a metadata title using these words, they will be ignored.
Examples of acceptable metadata titles: authorName, authorname, @authorName.
Creating new projects
To create a new project, either click New in the sidebar, or Projects > New in the top menu.
You can also add, edit or remove metadata to projects. Select a project in the project sidebar, then click Edit from the project sidebar or from the top menu. The same rules apply to naming metadata titles.