hanzo:archives, the web archiving company

Publishers create substantial volumes of commercially and culturally valuable content. Hanzo tools and services provide the means for publishers to capture their content in its web-published form and retain it in an open and accessible web archive. Such an archive can be for preservation purposes, backup, compliance or for legal deposit. In any of these cases, Hanzo's tools provide the means to do this with full life-cycle and workflow support, enabling publishers to retain full control of their content throughout.

Publishers retain control

Recent changes in legal deposit legislation will require national libraries around the world to collect and preserve their nations’ websites and online publications, similar to the more traditional print and electronic publications. But there is a significant difference: web publishing requires a fresh approach as it is very difficult to properly capture and preserve websites.

Hanzo’s web archiving solutions provide the perfect means for publishers to meet this requirement - and, crucially, to retain control over their own content while doing so. They enable publishers to generate a flat, structured and future-proof version of their own content for submission to their library or archive, for example, under legal or voluntary deposit.

At the same time Hanzo's solutions provide the means to eliminate the difficulties in maintaining continuous access to web-based content over the long term, removing technical dependencies, and hence minimising the cost of ownership of the archive content. By allowing controlled and easy access to legacy web material, Hanzo's solutions create new opportunities and potential revenue streams from this legacy. Any content that has ever been published in Web format can now be made accessible forever in its original form.

Building a persistent Blogosphere

The emergence of the participatory culture on the internet is having a huge impact on digital media, characterised by a levelling effect, where all consumers can now be producers of content. Moreover, increasing participation is leading the digital world into an era of increasing diversity, increasing cultural expression and bringing continuous incremental change. Participants decide which services and which means of communication they want to use, how they are combined, and when and where to use them.

This increasing diversity and participation presents a set of new challenges in web archiving.

Digital memory loss on the Web can mean a number of things to the blogger and blogging community, for example, link-rot, where over time, pages are deleted or moved or changed, resulting in the original URI pointing to something else, or nothing at all. This is a big problem: the half-life of the Web is around 2 years, which means that every two years, our collective intelligence and expression of our cultural, scientific, artistic and technical selves, is diminished by a half.

An excellent example of link-rot can be seen in this archive of Boing Boing's first 5 years, in which 25% of almost 47k outlinks no longer point to anything.

We suspect also that a good proportion of the outlinks that do point to something don't necessarily point to the original location.

What's needed is a persistent blogosphere.

Hanzo's approach to creating a web memory

Collecting and preserving published and blogged content presents unique challenges in publishing.

Hanzo's solutions offer unique capabilities. They provide the ability to archive client-side, which means archived content is retained and browsable again, independent of the technology and agency that created it. Hanzo provides tools to embed archiving capabilities into CMS's and blogging systems, which means a full archive can be achieved at optimal quality. All Hanzo solutions provide the ability to track feeds, which means that a wide reach is ensured and rapid changes in content and content structure can be captured reliably.