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Building personal or unique collections of web archives is challenging, especially when it comes to archiving what a user sees at an instant. The tools required to build web archive collections may not be available for an individual because they require time consuming set up and or complex configurations after set up to initiate the archiving process.
The tools used in the web archiving process typically consist of a web crawler (to gather large sets of web pages and their embedded resources) and a means to access the web archives (to view the archived content). In a standard institutional archiving setup, the archival crawler Heritrix is used and the access tool used to view the archives generated by Heritrix is OpenWayback. Both of these tools can be a daunting task 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.
## What Is WAIL's Purpose?WAIL is designed to:
- Bridge the gap between institutional and individual archiving tools.
- Streamline the process of creating and viewing web archives.
- Simplify the configuration of the archiving tools.
Both Heritrix and OpenWayback require specific configurations depending on which operating system they are being run. Each operating system has its own set of required dependencies to effectively use these archiving tools. Installing and configuring the tools and dependencies requires users to have a somewhat technical background and administrator permissions. Further, configuring Heritrix crawls is not always straightforward, thus adding another technical requirement for potential users of the tools.
WAIL takes care of this by packaging everything required to utilize these tools and configures them according to the operating system on which these tools are being run. The sole requirement of these tools if used via WAIL is the ability to download and run WAIL. Configuration of the crawls is as simple as entering URL(s) into the WAIL interface and pressing a "archive now" button.
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