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1. What Is WAIL?
2. What Is WAIL For?
3. What Problems Does WAIL Solve?

## What is WAIL? Building personal or unique collections of web archives is challenging especially when it comes to archiving what I see now. The tools required to build these collection may not be available for an individual because they require time consuming set up and or complex configurations after set up to just start the archival process.

The tools used in the web archival process typically consist of a web crawler(to gather large sets of web pages and their embedded resources) and an access means(to view the archived content). In a standard institutional archiving setup, the web crawler Heritrix is used and the access tool used to view the archives generated by Heritrix is OpenWayback. Both of which can be daunting for an individual to set up.

WAIL(Web Archiving Integration Layer) is a stand-alone GUI-based application that provides one-click configuration and utilization of both Heritrix and OpenWayback on a user's personal computer.

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What Is WAIL For?

WAIL is designed to:

• Bridge the gap between institutional archiving tools and individual archiving tools.
• Streamline the process of creating and viewing web archives
• Simplify the configuration of the archival tools

## What Problems Does WAIL Solve? Both Heritrix and OpenWayback require specific configurations depending on which operating system they are being run on, as well as, come with their own set of required dependencies. This requires users to have some kind of technical background and administrator permissions to install the required dependencies. Also configuration of the crawls performed by Heritrix are difficult thus adding another technical requirement to simply performing the crawls.

WAIL takes care of this for you by packaging everything required to utilize these tools and configures them according to the operating system being run on. Making the only requirement to utilize these tools is that a user can download and run WAIL. Configuration of the crawls is as simple as entering URL(s) into WAIL and pressing a "archive now" button.