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Social media content and user participation has increased dramatically since the advent of Web 2.0. Blogs have become relevant to every aspect of business and personal life. Nevertheless, we do not have the right tools to aggregate and preserve blog content correctly, as well as to manage blog archives effectively. Given the rising importance of blogs, it is crucial to build systems to facilitate blog preservation, safeguarding an essential part of our heritage that will prove valuable for current and future generations. In this paper, we present our work in progress towards building a novel blog preservation platform featuring robust digital preservation, management and dissemination facilities for blogs. This work is part of the BlogForever project which is aiming to make an impact to the theory and practice of blog preservation by creating guidelines and software that any individual or organization could use to preserve their blogs.

Blogs are one of the most prominent means of communication on the web. Their content, interconnections and influence constitute a unique socio-technical artefact of our times which needs to be preserved. The BlogForever project has established best practices and developed an innovative system to harvest, preserve, manage and reuse blog content. This paper presents the latest developments of the blog crawler which is a key component of the BlogForever platform. More precisely, our work concentrates on techniques to automatically extract content such as articles, authors, dates and comments from blog posts. To achieve this goal, we introduce a simple yet robust and scalable algorithm to generate extraction rules based on string matching using the blog's web feed in conjunction with blog hypertext. Furthermore, we present a system architecture which is characterised by efficiency, modularity, scalability and interoperability with third-party systems. Finally, we conduct thorough evaluations of the performance and accuracy of our system.

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Abstract. Europeana has put in a stretch many known procedures in digital libraries, imposing requirements difficult to be implemented in many small institutions, often without dedicated systems support personnel. Although there are freely available open source software platforms that provide most of the commonly needed functionality such as OAI-PMH support, the migration from legacy software may not be easy, possible or desired. Furthermore, advanced requirements like selective harvesting according to complex criteria are not widely supported. To accommodate these needs and help institutions contribute their content to Europeana, we developed a series of tools. For the majority of small content providers that are running DSpace, we developed a DSpace plugin, to convert and augment the Dublin Core metadata according to Europeana ESE requirements. For sites with different software, incompatible with OAI-PMH, we developed wrappers enabling repeatable generation and harvesting of ESE-compatible metadata via OAI-PMH. In both cases, the system is able to select and harvest only the desired metadata records, according to a variety of configuration criteria of arbitrary complexity. We applied our tools to providers with sophisticated needs, and present the benefits they achieved.