Warrick

I just came across Warrick, a neat research project that takes advantage of cached web crawls to restore lost web site. Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. It searches the Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. It's not guaranteed and it is a research project and not a production service, but it could help when there's no other option. It falls under the general category of research that they call "Lazy Preservation," a phrase that I can see some loving and some hating.

When I followed the link to the about page and I saw that it was a research project at Old Dominion University, I immediately suspected that it was one of Michael Nelson's students, and it was. I briefly blogged Joan Smith's mod-oai work last year. Michael is always working on something interesting, especially his current work on OAI-ORE.