According to Ralph and Niels, although web as a new form of media embedding gigantic sources of knowledge and information, it remains almost untapped source for research even in the academic realm, researches on how exactly people are engaged with the web and the information it contains has yet not being fully studied. This book aims to make a start in this direction.

In this introduction part of the book, they started with the argument that the web is not a single entity as is commonly perceived in the English speaking culture, it is a series of clusters influenced by linguistic factors and policies of state and sites promoting shared interest such as commerce and personal relations. They also pointed out that the way people store and manage information with web is different from the way in which they keep diaries, photo albums and other collections of mementos.

On the scholar side, they spilled a lot of ink over introduction of the history of digital archive, which is a good knowledge to know but a little bit tedious. There’s one thing upon which they make a good point is that they call for sustainable collaborations to be created to ensure common standards, as well as better tools for researchers because currently the web archives and researcher communities are developing independently.

The authors also brought about possible future topics based on relation of the researchers and the web. One topic I found very interesting is that the shape of the web is constantly evolving, the form of the web will greatly influence the behavior of people in terms of extracting information from it.

Ralph and Niels intention of writing this book is good, but they didn’t give a clear definition of the archive web, is there an autonomous type of websites that could be called archive web or can I say the entire internet is a huge digital archive web because search engines such as google can help you reach almost every piece of archive in stored online and they are much more sophisticated than any other search tools embedded in those websites specific for digital archive.

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