Collecting primary sources from web archives: A tale of scarcity and abundance

The World Wide Web is the largest collection of human testimonies that we have ever had at our fingertips. Spanning from institutional websites to digital libraries, from personal blogs to Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, from online newspapers to large-scale knowledge bases, an immense number of born-digital testimonies is waiting to be retrieved, selected and studied by future historians. In addition to this, while these new resources are piling up steadily in front of our eyes, they are also rapidly replacing their analogue counterparts, from printed news articles to personal diaries, from letter correspondences to scientific publications. By acknowledging this sudden transition in production from printed to digital documents, the goal of this chapter is to present and discuss some of the new methodological issues that arise when these materials are to be employed as primary sources for studying the recent past