All the news

12 Nov 09

Global Corporation Selects Hanzo to Capture Brand Online

A US-headquartered global leader in the Food & Beverage industry selects Hanzo Archives to capture its web-based brand and heritage development. 

Capturing brand heritage is fast becoming an important directive for multinational companies with a long and historic brand identity. With web marketing and communications increasingly using dynamic web content, multimedia, Flash and the social web, finding a product that can meet the demanding challenges of capturing this can be just as challenging. Fortunately, Hanzo’s web archiving services have demonstrated that this can be done.

A representative of the company stated “Websites now contain unique information that doesn’t exist in any other form. While we can exhaustively capture advertisements, TV commercials, print, etc., we had so far not found a product that could successfully capture our websites. We are very excited by Hanzo’s capabilities.”

Watch this space for further developments with this client.

27 Oct 09

European Archive Licenses Hanzo Advanced Crawler

The European Archive, based in Paris and Amsterdam, is a prominent digital library of cultural artefacts, which includes music, movies and websites. On behalf of various government agencies, the European Archive captures and archives 1,000’s of government websites around Europe. The European Archive has now selected Hanzo Archives to provide the technology to capture these sites.

As web technologies evolve, with increasing use of dynamic HTML and embedded rich media and Flash, a significant proportion of these websites become difficult if not impossible to capture using generally available open source crawlers. The European Archive therefore turned to Hanzo Archives’ advanced crawler technology to ensure they’re able to capture the most challenging of these sites.

Hanzo’s crawlers are now deployed by EA alongside their existing tools and are used to capture some of Europe’s most complex government and cultural websites.

01 Aug 08

Hanzo Supplies Dutch Municipalities Archive

Gemeenteweb B.V., of Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, selected Hanzo Archives enterprise web archiving system to power their innovative Municipalities Web Archive. Hanzo's commercial and technical solution enabled Gemeenteweb to offer public-accessible archives of municipalities websites, to comply with the municipality's legal regulations. A bonus to this development for the municipalities are the lasting digital heritage of their websites.

John Heins, CEO of Gemeentaweb said "Gemeenteweb is an innovative company. We wanted to develop something that really worked and met the regulatory demands for the Municipalities. There wasn't an application available to archive websites and their content. But, we found Hanzo, who could supply us with advanced technology that fitted within the Municipalities legal framework".

Of his experience of working with the team at Hanzo Archives Ltd, John Heins of Gemeentaweb said "the hands on mentality of Hanzo team worked well for us. Their co-operative effort has brought a lot of Municipalities to us with quite a few already archiving their sites. In 2009 we expect to attract a lot of new Municipalities to to use our archiving service."

26 Mar 08

Hanzo, OII and IA receive transatlantic funding

It was announced today that 'The World Wide Web of Humanities project (Oxford Internet Institute and Hanzo Archives Ltd in the UK and Internet Archive in USA) is to be awarded funding under a transatlantic collaboration between JISC and the US's National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) - the First JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants.

The project is one of five digitisation projects to be awarded funding of around £600,000 ($1,150,000).

The World Wide Web of Humanities will create and assemble a suite of open source tools for data collection and curation, to support new methodologies for Internet research built around large collections of web data, using automated tools to extract, index, and analyze the data. The collection will be designed to help researchers and policy makers gain an understanding both of the state of the art of e-Humanities and of historical trends and developments in the field.

Partners:

• Hanzo Archives Limited (UK)
• Oxford Internet Institute (UK)
• Internet Archive (US)

Announcements:

• Announcement by the US's National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Announcement by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

10 Mar 08

White Paper on Enterprise Web Archiving for E-discovery

Today we release our white paper "E-discovery: why archiving your web presence is a business necessity", in which we seek to answer the following following questions:

1. How do you archive your documents and ensure they comply with all the relevant business processes, laws and regulations?
2. Most organisations have systems for dealing with paper documents from contracts and memos to advertising and marketing materials. Many also have systems for emails. But what about sales and marketing literature on your website, pages from your intranet, customer forums, blogs and so on? They all have to be compliant, and you may need to refer to them in the future.
3. How do you archive a website and all its links, when it may be hosted on multiple servers using different software and possibly managed by an agency?

Download Whitepaper

Corporations, government agencies and other institutions increasingly rely on web-based publications and collaboration, such as: websites, extranets, intranets, blogs, wikis, customer forums, etc. Collectively they are referred to as the Total Web Presence (TWP).

From a legal perspective, the TWP is a central responsibility of the corporation as a whole, with liability for content and accuracy - consistent with it being a significant channel for both external and internal communications.

Traditional backup of databases and servers is not an option for maintaining accessible web-based information, especially where CMSs are used, utilising a broad range of technologies and systems, databases, schema and templates that inevitably evolve and are very costly to maintain beyond their period of active use.

An Enterprise Web Archiving Policy is the only means of creating and maintaining a stable, time-structured, verifiably authentic and independent version of the corporate Total Web Presence.

The client-side archiving approach is the most appropriate in the corporate environment as it generates an authentic flat HTML archive, an exact equivalent of what a generic user would have experienced. This is a significant advantage for generic uses of the archive, such as business intelligence, as well as legal uses, such as regulatory compliance.

The first solutions for implementing this approach, as well as emerging standards in the field, are presented in this white paper.

Hanzo's understanding of these challenges, coupled with its unique technology, enables corporations to address their Web archiving problems today, with the confidence that should they need to access old content, it will be quick and straightforward.

20 Feb 08

Hanzo releases open source WARC Tools

With the generous support of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), the people behind the worlds largest and most comprehensive web archives, Hanzo has developed an extensive open source library and tools for the creation and manipulation of ISO standard compliant WARC-based web archives.

As the new ISO standard for WARC (Web Archive file format) nears completion, Hanzo's release of an advanced software library, 'libwarc', together with command line tools and web services to exploit this new format, will enable software developers, libraries and archivists around the world to easily migrate to and support this new standard.

WARC Tools have been made available to the development community through the Apache 2 license; download the source code, read documentation and join the discussion here:

• WARC Tools Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/warc-tools
• WARC Tools Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/warc-tools

WARC Tools core component is 'libwarc', an extensible and fast C library:

• Read WARC's predecessor format, ARC, originating from the Internet Archive and used extensively throughout the world
• Read WARC files
• Write WARC files
• Provide a range of powerful record-level iterators
• Provide SWIG-based APIs for a range of dynamic languages and Java

In addition, there are a number of command line tools, for high level functions:

• ARC to WARC migration -- solving a problem facing many of the original web archiving institutions
• WARC verification
• WARC web service -- access the functionality of libwarc over the web
• mod_warc -- fast web access to WARC records, enabling WARC archive access tools development

Developing the WARC Tools is in line with Hanzo's aim of commodising web archiving software and services to enable the the widespread collection and preservation of Web content.

"Hanzo began development of libwarc as a means to embrace the emerging standard for web archive files, thereby enabling seamless interoperability accross web archives at a fundamental level." said Mark Middleton, CEO of Hanzo Archives Limited.

"IIPC are happy to support the development of WARC Tools. This is an extremely important development for the web archiving community as the tools make a significant contribution to the overall standardisation effort and de-risk the migration of important archives to the new standard.", said Gildas Illien, Technical Officer of IIPC.

Hanzo continue to develop the library and tools, focussing on documentation, high-level command line and web-based services. In addition, Hanzo will incorporate libwarc within its own products in the coming months.

WARC Tools are important to the web archiving community as they will make a significant contribution to the standardisation effort and de-risk the migration of important archives to the new standard.

08 Feb 08

Hanzo in European Project: Living Web Archives

Hanzo is delighted to be the commercial Web Archiving business partner to collaborate on the Europe-wide Living Web Archives project. This 3-year project is funded by the European Union through their 7th Research Framework Programme.

The objective of the Living Web Archives project is to develop the next generation Web Archiving methods and tools that capture all types of content in its dynamic and hidden form. In contrast with the commonly used "freeze" of Web content "snapshots", the LiWA approach will transform content storage into a "Living" web archive.

"Living", as the term itself implies, refers to:

1. long term interpretability in its evolving form;
2. improved archive fidelity by eliminating irrelevant noise; and
3. widening of the scope to include a wide variety of content

At the end of the project, LIWA will deliver the next generation of Web content capture, preservation, analysis and enrichment services that will dramatically improve fidelity, coherence and interpretability of its archives.

How does Liwa intend to achieve this ambitious and state-of-the-art project?

LiWA is a collaboration of expert partners in their field:

• L3S Research Centre in Hannover, Germany;
• The European Archive, Paris, France;
• The Max Planck Institut for Computer Science in Saarbrücken, Germany;
• The Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary;
• The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision in Hilversum, The Netherlands;
• Hanzo Archives Limited in London, England;
• The National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, the Czech Republic;
• The Moravian Library in Kounicova, the Czech Republic.

The project will be rolled out over the next three years delivering tools and services that:

1. will reduce the amount of fake content by detecting spam and prioritising crawls that detect content value;
2. will improve content positioning in time and space with faster access to an evolving web content;
3. has applied methods for semantic and terminology extraction so as to detect and handle evolving semantics and the interpretations of terminology thereby preserving the usefulness, quality and accessibility of the archives over time.

The developed Liwa service will be demonstrated through two applications that will focus on the Social Web and on the archiving of Audio Visual content.

The benefits of this project is essentially twofold: archiving institutions will be able to archive higher volumes of volatile and dynamic digital content and archive users will benefit from higher quality of archive content and improved search facilities.

For more information on Living Web Archives, please visit: http://www.liwa-project.eu/.

29 Jun 07

Hanzo archiving the birthplace of the World Wide Web

CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, selected Hanzo to archive their entire public website and their collection of collaborators' sites and make the archives available to the public.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web while at CERN in 1989 and published the world's first website on 6 August 1991. Years later, Hanzo are archiving the whole of CERNs Web presence, and sharing this archive with European Archive and Internet Archive to ensure its long term preservation.

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world's largest particle physics laboratory and its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research.

CERN has a website of similar scale, consisting of 10's of websites and 100's of microsites, plus many more collaborators sites and publishers sites carrying stories, news and insights into this extraordinary institution.

Using Hanzo Enterprise software and archiving services, Hanzo are helping CERN to collect a comprehensive snapshot of all accessible content several times a year, plus more frequent captures of regularly updated items such as news. Hanzo provides crawl engineering services and QA services to ensure the archived content is of the highest quality.

In addition, Hanzo are uploading this entire collection to the public web collection of the European Archive.

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world's largest particle physics laboratory and its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. CERN currently has approximately 2600 full-time employees. Some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.

Member states' contributions to CERN for the year 2008 totalled CHF 1,075.863 million (around USD 990 million).

Most of the activities at CERN are currently directed towards building a new collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the experiments for it. The LHC represents a large-scale, worldwide scientific cooperation project. Physics experiments are expected to start in late spring 2008.

23 Jun 07

Hanzo Presents Enterprise Web Archiving at IWAW

Hanzo are at the International Web Archiving Workshop in Vancouver, 23 June 2007 and we are pleased to show:

1. how anyone can archive using just their blog, using Wordpress, Hanzoweb plugin and Hanzoweb
2. how content owners and site owners can archive, using a custom application plugin
3. how professional archivists can establish small to large archiving operations off-the-shelf, using Hanzo Enterprise

In these demonstrations we aim to show how our novel approach to web archiving can provide instant web archiving capability to publishers, bloggers and end-users, using minimally intrusive user interfaces that require minimal, if any, training. We also show how corporations and memory institutions can start archiving operations quickly and at very low cost, with comprehensive archiving capabilities, service level agreements, support and training services, aimed at professional use.

Please visit our website for more information about our solutions and products.

10 Jun 07

Nations’ Memorybank uses Hanzo Archives Software

Nations' Memorybank is dedicated to capturing moments in everyday history for everyday people, their families and their communities. The site is a public archive of memories, enabling users to record moments in their lives for the future.

To keep the collection of precious and valuable memories, memorabilia and research items safe, Nations' Memorybank turned to Hanzo Archives. Hanzo's unique archiving software is embedded into Nations' Memorybank. The archiving software captures every memory and media item that is uploaded and archives it into Hanzo's public web collection in an application-neutral format. This archive is regularly donated to other public web archives for shared preservation.

This means that everything that is entered into Nations' Memorybank is safe and secure, and can be retrieved at any time, even beyond the lifetime of Nations Memorybank, Hanzo, or any other single institution.

Nick Barratt, Co-Founder & Director of Firebird Media, the company behind Nations' Memorybank, said: "Firebird Media are delighted to have contracted Hanzo Archives to provide secure digital archiving services for Nations' Memorybank, the online people's archive for memories and personal heritage material. Hanzo have also built the software to accompany the digital archive facility, including memory mapping, interactive community forums, sophisticated search engine and secure members' zone."

He added "Nations' Memorybank is the only website where all your personal memories, memorabilia and research can be archived safely for posterity. By pooling our resources, we can create a 'people's archive' where the forgotten stories from the past can be kept alongside our experiences of the present, creating a living resource for future generations."

This is a unique proposition for user-generated content. Hanzo are proud to be making this contribution. For more information on these capabilities, please review Hanzo's product overview and archive services in particular.