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Category: Communication

Description: I will present a lightning talk on a newly released prototype which combines automated web archiving, web browser emulation, and web server emulation to create an automated system to preserve projects built on the Scalar digital publishing platform. The talk will include a quick demo of the prototype, available at: https://scalar.webrecorder.net/ and explore a new approach for preservation at the intersection of web archiving and software emulation. This prototype extends the work done in Webrecorder and oldweb.today in archiving high-fidelity web sites and emulating web browsers, and adds the emulation of the web server as a final component. The talk will cover the use of containerization in aiding the preservation of well-defined, bounded web platforms and publications. This system provides a novel approach that unifies the preservation of the web client (browser), web archive data (stored in WARC files), and web server software (Scalar software running on Apache/PHP). The system demonstrates how emulated servers can be integrated with a WARC-based web archive replay system, and how containers can be used to facilitate the archiving process, resulting in a one-click automated archiving solution for Scalar-based works.