WARC file format becomes an ISO standard

WARC, an extension of the ARC file format, used for archiving web material, has been made an ISO standard.

WARC format offers new possibilities, notably the recording of HTTP request headers, the recording of arbitrary metadata, the allocation of an identifier for every contained file, the management of duplicates and of migrated records, and the segmentation of the records. WARC files are intended to store every type of digital content, either retrieved by HTTP or another protocol.

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Standardization offers a guarantee of durability and evolution for the
WARC format. It will help web archiving entering into the mainstream
activities of heritage institutions and other branches, by fostering the
development of new tools and ensuring the interoperability of
collections. Several applications are already WARC compliant, such as
the Heritrix [http://crawler.archive.org/ ] crawler for harvesting, the
WARC tools [http://code.google.com/p/warc-tools/ ] for data management and exchange, the Wayback Machine
[http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wayback/ ], NutchWAX
[http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/nutch/ ] and other
search tools [http://code.google.com/p/search-tools/ ] for access. The
international recognition of the WARC format and its applicability to
every kind of digital object will provide strong incentives to use it
within and beyond the web archiving community.

- Abby Grotke, IIPC Communications Officer, Library of Congress

See the IIPC press release.

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