MementoEmbed and Raintale for Web Archive Storytelling
This addresses the challenge for archivists in presenting large web archive collections effectively, though it is incremental as it builds on existing web storytelling methods.
The authors tackled the problem of displaying web archive collections by developing MementoEmbed and Raintale to generate cards and stories for mementos, enabling archivists to export them to various formats.
For traditional library collections, archivists can select a representative sample from a collection and display it in a featured physical or digital library space. Web archive collections may consist of thousands of archived pages, or mementos. How should an archivist display this sample to drive visitors to their collection? Search engines and social media platforms often represent web pages as cards consisting of text snippets, titles, and images. Web storytelling is a popular method for grouping these cards in order to summarize a topic. Unfortunately, social media platforms are not archive-aware and fail to consistently create a good experience for mementos. They also allow no UI alterations for their cards. Thus, we created MementoEmbed to generate cards for individual mementos and Raintale for creating entire stories that archivists can export to a variety of formats.