The Web has become one of the major channels for dissemination of culture and knowledge. There is a growing awareness of the need to track and archive Web content. However, the raw nature of Web content, the unpredictable remote changes that can affect it, and the growth of database-driven web sites make usual archiving and back-up procedures inefficient to preserve Web material. This book details existing methods of Web archiving as well as available technology, often inspired from other domains but adapted to the specific topic of Web archiving. It addresses three stages of archiving: building, using, and preserving.

Julien Masanès is a cofounder and the Director of the European Archive, a non-profit foundation for Web preservation and digital cultural access. Before this he had directed the Web Archiving Project at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) since 2000. He also participated very actively in the creation of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), which he coordinated during its first two years.

He is a curator and received a degree in librarianship at ENSSIB (Lyon) in 1999. He was a digital preservation adviser at BnF and has participated in various national and international initiatives in this domain, such as the European Project NEDLIB, the Global Digital Format Registry and the OCLC/RLG Open Archive Information System Certification Group. He has numerous publications in this field, and he launched and presently chairs the International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) series, the main international rendezvous in this domain.