Guest editors’ introduction to the special issue on web archiving

Since 1997, numerous organizations around the world have archived much of the content on the World Wide Web. This movement has spread, with more and more groups participating, so now there is a substantial research, development, operation, and utilization infrastructure supporting the collection, storage, indexing, sharing, and accessing of a large portion of the history of webpages. This infrastructure is shared by individuals, groups, educational institutions, government agencies, corporations, and other entities. Standards have emerged, tools have been devised, and analysis methods have been applied. All of this work helps show how, in the digital world, libraries and archives can be well supported, separately and in combination, by digital library methods.