I am one of a network of academic researchers from around the world working on collecting media market data. One problem is that referenced sources often disappear which makes validation later difficult or impossible. So, I thought I would recommend self-hosting something like archive.org that would allow affiliated researchers to submit their web references and have their sources efficiently archived in a central project repository. That would allow validation and continuity for when web-hosted text and files disappear or researchers leave.

I have been looking at ArchiveBox. If you have experience of this or a similar solution, would that fit the bill? The important thing is efficiency for researchers submitting/retrieving pages and files, and openness in structure and formats so that the archive would remain useful if ArchiveBox or similar disappears. FOSS of course means you can’t be locked out anyway.

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    Check out Zotero: https://www.zotero.org/

    Zotero is an open source bibliography manager. It’s my main go to tool for generating works cited pages, like during essays.

    But, it also has a browser extension, which can download, and archive sites or academic articles you are adding to the sources. I would then use the fulltext search that zotero provides for easy searching of sources.

    Unfortunately, it’s not hosted, which would make it difficult to share.

    EDIT: It does look like the server component is open source, AGPLv3: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/

    But, I cannot find any deployment instructions. But, it looks like their hosted version lets users create groups of shared items, including sharing archived snapshots of the various items.

    • Stopwatch1986@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I have been using Zotero every day for more than two decades and somehow it hasn’t cross my mind. You may be on to something.

      Zotero supports public and private shared bibliographies that you can subscribe to through the client or their web interface. Each entry contains the bibliographical details, notes attachments, file attachments and links to local files. It also captures webpages and metadata through the browser addon. The local database can be backed up and, if self-hosted, you have control. The best part is that academic researchers will be familiar with the software and process. One downside is that the cached file is not independently archived so it could be tampered with. Thanks for the idea.