%0 Journal Article
%T Web archives as research infrastructure for digital societies: the case study of Arquivo.pt
%A Gomes, Daniel
%J Archeion
%V 2022
%R 10.4467/26581264ARC.22.012.16665
%N 123
%P 46-85
%K Web archiving, digital preservation, recommendations
%@ 0066-6041
%D 2022
%U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/archeion/article/web-archives-as-research-infrastructure-for-digital-societies-the-case-study-of-arquivo-pt
%X Humans are the dominant species on Earth. Our advantage comes from our unique capacity of organising at large scale to reach common goals. In digital societies, organising requires communicating information and these days, most of it is published exclusively online. The problem is that online information disappears quickly, after a few months. Humanity’s dependence on online information is strong but still recent and the consequences of losing the historical perspective over online data are yet to be seen. Web archives are digital preservation systems that collect, store and provide access to historical web data. Scientific researchers have been using web archives. However, web archives should also be used by the wider public so that they may serve digital societies. Arquivo.pt is a public web archive started in 2007 that enables search and access to historical information preserved from the Web since the 1990s. This article presents Arquivo. pt as a case study for a research infrastructure that has been developed to serve wider communities at national and international levels. The article shares the main lessons learned so that other web archiving initiatives may arise and be developed at a faster pace. It describes the existing tools and activities which enable exploration of historical web-archived collections. Finally, it presents challenges related to creating web archives and proposes actions to address them.