Add URLs from papers to the Web Archive

[dmhowcroft]

Many websites fall into disrepair and go offline even after being published in a conference paper. One way we can ensure that at least the pages describing a project (if not the corpora, etc) produced by the project) remain accessible is to systematically add each URL featuring in a paper in the ACL anthology to the Internet Archive.

This would be an enhancement improving the archival state of our field going forward.

• [ ] develop scripts to accurately parse URLs in ACL papers wherever text or OCR'd text is available
• [ ] find out the best way to add a list of URLs to the Internet Archive (e.g. is there an API?)
• [ ] write a script to add all URLs published at ACL venues to the Internet Archive
• [ ] run the script once a year / advocate for ACL to encourage or require authors to submit sites that they reference to the archive when camera-ready papers are submitted

[mjpost]

I like this idea. In general it’s good for us to limit what the Anthology does so as to avoid incurring technical debt that deluge our volunteers, so this is a good solution since it has us continuing to rely on external resources.

Another idea to add to this: if we extracted links in a clean manner, we could add them as links on the top level page, similar to what we do with attachments now.

Are you just filing this idea or do you also have some interest in heading this up in your spare time?

[dmhowcroft]

I wanted to file the idea while it was fresh; I've been skimming a lot of older SIGGEN papers and occasionally following their links, which is what made me think of it.

In principle, I'm open to heading this up, but I could not make any promises about a timeline.

If I find time to start on it, I'll post here; if I haven't made such a post and someone else is interested in starting on it, I hope they do :)