Abstract:
The present invention is a method for archiving data stored in a plurality of linked web pages, including traversing the plurality of web pages by recursively following the links to identify each of the individual web pages to be archived; making a list of web pages to be archived; sequentially retrieving the contents of each web page on the list; forming a digital image of the visible content of each web page; and ultimately creating a visually perceptible archival copy of each web page from the digital image on a durable, human readable medium.

Description:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION  
         [0001]    This invention relates generally to the archiving of information and more particularly to a method and apparatus for archiving digital information and more particularly information in the form of web pages.  
         BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION  
         [0002]    In an information age archiving of information including digital information is extremely important. It has long been known how to archive information in a digital form on a variety of available media, including rigid and floppy magnetic disks, tapes, optical media and similar formats. Each of these media formats has some advantages and can be useful for short-term storage, but all suffer from one or more disadvantages. Many of these media formats are physically fragile and not suited for long term storage. Most of these media formats are recorder specific, meaning that they have no human readable bootstrap information to allow the information recorded to be decoded, decrypted or decompressed without specific knowledge of the recording manner in which the information was recorded.  
           [0003]    Hardware for reading and writing recorder specific media changes frequently and often becomes obsolete and unavailable at the time the archived information needs to be retrieved. Even if the hardware used to record and recover the recorder specific media are available software drivers and applications as well as operating systems used to create the media may be unavailable. With technology changing as quickly as we have seen, major changes in technology occur that makes reader specific media not only obsolete but also make the information stored on such media unrecoverable. Consider for example, 8-inch floppy disks. For were only recently a standard recording media. Today it is virtually impossible to recover data from 8-inch floppy disks because 8-inch floppy disk readers are no longer available today.  
           [0004]    In the last 5 years, the worldwide web has become very popular. Many millions of web pages have been created and put on line, to provide information, or in some cases, more recently, to transact business over the Internet. In most cases, a language like HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is written to describe the web pages and is interpreted by software “browsers”, such as Netscape. Most of the earliest web pages are already lost to the world because no one archived them. Given the large number of business-to-business transactions now coming on line, there is a need to easily archive web pages for posterity.  
           [0005]    One approach to long-term archiving of digital information is to periodically migrate the stored digital information to a current media format based on the current recording technology. This is effective as long as the current recording technology is in use at the time when the recorded information is to be retrieved. If the recording technology is no longer available, then it is necessary to convert the stored information to a new format, test the process and re-record the information so that it can be retrieved at a later late. At the rate of current technology changes, as has been seen in the computer industry, this conversion to new stored data formats must occur every few years. This is both costly and risky for businesses because it introduces potential errors and exposes the stored data to alteration or deletion.  
           [0006]    There is a need for a method and apparatus for archiving digital data that produces a substantially unalterable secure image, especially data stored in the form of web pages, that overcomes the limitations of the current methods. There is a need for method and apparatus for archiving digital information that allows low cost storage and retrieval that is convenient, allows multi-user access, is simple to read and write, and produces a long-life recording that does not need to be translated to other media formats in a year or two.  
         SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION  
         [0007]    The present invention is a method for archiving data stored in a plurality of linked web pages, including traversing the plurality of web pages by recursively following the links to identify each of the individual web pages to be archived; making a list of web pages to be archived; sequentially retrieving the contents of each web page on the list; forming a digital image of the visible content of each web page; and ultimately creating a visually perceptible archival copy of each web page from the digital image on a durable, human readable medium. 
       
    
    
     BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS  
       [0008]    [0008]FIG. 1 depicts various linked web pages with various indicia.  
         [0009]    [0009]FIG. 2 depicts a functional block diagram of the present invention.  
         [0010]    [0010]FIG. 3 depicts a functional block diagram of the present invention.  
         [0011]    [0011]FIG. 4 depicts a functional block diagram of the present invention.  
         [0012]    [0012]FIG. 5 depicts a functional block diagram of the present invention. 
     
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT  
       [0013]    In the present invention a digital web site archiver,  10  as shown in FIG. 1, that archives digital information from a web site using specially-designed software  12  that will work with a readily available writing device  14 , such as Eastman Kodak Company&#39;s Document Archive Writer, that allow the user to write electronic images (such as a TIFF file) to a storage media  16 , such as microfilm, for archival storage and later use a reading device  18  to make the digital image available to a viewer  20 . When a web page is identified that is to be archived, the program converts that electronic image to a suitable image format such as a TIFF, and places this file along with a unique identifier in a folder for subsequent archiving. Proceeding in this way, a web site may be understood and prepared for archival storage.  
         [0014]    The web site digital archiver  10  includes the software program  12  for archiving data that is in a digital format  22  (data) in a computer  24 . The software program  12  accepts a web site address (such as www.aksa-sds.com) as an input, along with other parameters to be described below relating generally to the quality and quantity of the archived record or data  22 , The data  22  can be in the form of text such as HTML text, graphics or other digital data formats. The data  22  is often stored in the computer  24  as a plurality of linked web pages  26 . The web site digital archiver  10  locates a first web page  28  that is of interest to the user and identifies an address  30 , such as www.aksa-sds.com, associated with the web page  28 . The web site digital archiver  10  transverses the first web page  28  by recursively following the links  32  to identify linked individual web pages  34 A,  34 B as shown in FIG. 1.  
         [0015]    As shown in FIG. 2, after the web site digital archiver  10  has connected to the internet through an internet portal  36 , it goes to a web site  38  and identifies address  30 , hereafter referred to as an URL address  30  on the first web page  28  of interest. The internet portal  36  uses internet web browser technology and is a set of web browser interfaces. The web site digital archiver  10  recursively follows links on the first web page  28  to identify each of the individual web pages which are linked to the first web page  28 . These directly linked individual web pages  34 A,  34 B are often called native links  34 A,  34 B and the web site archiver  10  can also find related links that are one or more links away, called non-native links  39  through the software that performs the Find Links operation  40 . The web site digital archiver  10  then makes a list of these web pages to be archived  42 . In the present invention the FindLinks operation  40  is a portion of the archiving software  12 .  
         [0016]    The web site digital archiver  10  sequentially retrieves the contents of each web page archived on the list by doing what is called a capture of the web page snapshot  44 . The web page snapshot  44  capture involves three major steps. First, a snapshot of a viewable web page area  46  is taken and then an extended view of the website window can be viewed through the computer screen by scrolling up and down  48  to capture additional portions or snippets of the web site that are not viewable in the screen of the computer. Finally, the web site digital archiver  10  combines all the snippets or portions of a web page  50  to make the complete web page snapshot  44 . This capturing step will be described later in more detail.  
         [0017]    The web site digital archiver  10  takes the digital contents of each web page  34 , usually the visible portions, to form a visible digital image  52  and then to create a visibly perceptible archive copy  54  of the digital image  52  from the web page that was captured in the web page snapshot  44 . FIG. 3 shows a viewable screen display  56 . The web site digital archiver  10  must be capable in the screen capture step  44  of capturing all of the data  22  on one or more linked web pages  28 , including both native links  34  and non-native links  39 . As shown in FIG. 3, when there is an elongated page  58 , on which there is often more data  22  than is viewable in the viewable screen display  56 , the data  22  to be accessed is not accessible to be captured with out the help of the web site digital archiver  10 . The web site digital archiver  10  is capable of capturing a complete web page, including that information that is on the extended portion of the screen, viewable only by scrolling down using the scroll bars on the side of a web page, as shown in  58  using the Image Capture Operation portion of the software  12 . The web site digital archiver  10  proceeds by storing all the data  22 , including the additional information, as an image memory and combining it with the original screen display  56  for a total web image  60 . This process is described below in more detain in conjunction with FIG. 4.  
         [0018]    As shown in FIG. 4, the web site digital archiver  10  completes the web page snapshot capture  44  step by first taking a snapshot of the viewable area  46 , as is shown in FIG. 3 as the screen display  56 , and then scrolling to the bottom of the web page in step  62  before combining all the snippets of information on the web page  50 . The web site digital archiver  10  first identifies the size of a screen display  56  in step  64  and various image properties  66  to create a DIB section in step  68 . Then, the web site digital archiver  10  gets the screen device context in step  70  and creates compatible device context in the memory in step  72 . The web site digital archiver  10  copies the screen image to memory in step  74  and allocates image space in the memory in step  76  before appending the screen data in the image memory in step  78 . The web site digital archiver  10  then checks to see if the complete web site has been captured in step  80  and, if not, scrolls the page upward equal to size of the window  48  and then scrolls to the bottom of the web page as shown in step  62  before continuing to combine all the snippets as described above, resulting in a capture of all the data  22  on the web page. These steps continue until all the web pages on the URL list have been captured. The web site digital archiver  10  is designed to capture all the digital data on the related computer screens whether it is visible or not at an instant. The digital information that can be captured includes indicia such as alphanumeric characters, graphics and metatag information and other digital information that may not be visible to the user.  
         [0019]    After the web page snapshot  44  capture has occurred, the captured digital data image is archived as the visibly perceptive copy of the web page  54  and is put in a TIFF file as already discussed above. The stored TIFF file can be in a range of formats including color, gray, bi-tone and halftone depending on the properties of the captured data, storage apparatus and method and anticipated user requirements.  
         [0020]    [0020]FIG. 5 is a block diagram showing the FindLinks operation  40 . As discussed above, the current URL  30  is used to access the web page of interest  28  shown in FIG. 5 as step  86 . Next, the web site digital archiver  10  locates the related web sites and associated links to pages  32 , both the native links  34  and the non-native links  39  as shown in step  88 . The digital archiver  10  verifies that these links are viable links in step  90  and then checks if that link has already been added in step  92 . If the link has not been added, then the link is added to the URL list  42  in step  94 . If the link already exists, then the Find Links Operation  40  then proceeds to first find another native link  34  on web page  28 . After all the native links  34  desired are added to the URL list  42  then the FindLinks Operation software checks for additional non-native links  39  until there are no more associated links. During the whole process, the Find links Operation  40  allows the user to interact directly with the software  12  to direct the extent of the search and also to direct what links are to be stored.  
         [0021]    While the invention has been described with reference to preferred embodiments, those familiar with the art will understand that various changes may be made without departing from the scope of the invention. In addition, many modifications may be made to adapt a particular situation to the teachings of the invention without departing from the scope of the invention. Therefore, it is intended that the invention not be limited to the particular embodiments disclosed as the best mode contemplated for carrying out this invention, but that the invention will include all embodiments falling within the scope and spirit of the appending claims.