Access to archived contents

More about access to archived contents in the Portuguese Web Archive

How long does it take until a page appears in the Archive searches?

One year. The archived contents are available after a minimum amount of time to prevent the possibility of concurrent access with the original publishing web sites (embargo period).

May I request the blocking of access to archived contents which I authored?

Yes. To that effect you need to send us the list of all the addresses that you wish to be blocked and their respective archiving dates. You are required to prove that you hold a copyright over those contents and that there is no law, contract or judicial ruling that authorizes its divulgation. The Portuguese Web Archive recommends that you only request the blocking of contents if these contents breach any legally protected rights, namely copyright or industrial property rights.

Why do we request that you provide the above mentioned proof?

To prevent illegitimate blocking of contents by someone who does not hold the rights over them.

Why is it necessary to send the list of all the addresses?

Because the contents of a web site can be authored by different entities. Even the contents of a single page may have several copyrights holders. For instance, one person may hold the copyright over the text and another may hold the copyright over an embedded image.

Apart from the contents over which I hold a copyright, may I request the blocking of illegal contents that come to my knowledge?

Whenever it comes to your knowledge that a content to which you have accessed is illegal you are required to inform FCCN of that fact. After receiving that notification and if we confirm the manifest illegality of that content, FCCN will proceed according to the Law 7/2004 of the 7th January, and will withdraw that content or make it inaccessible.

Why are there incomplete sites or pages with missing images?

This can happen due to:

the page did not exist when the crawl was performed
crawl constraints that prevented it from being archived, for instance, an image embedded in a page had a size greater than permitted
publishing errors that prevented the page from being archived or correctly displayed

Why are there images that appear in an archived page and then disappear?

Some browsers, in order to be faster, automatically start loading the page and, in parallel, the corresponding images.

This causes the images of the current Web, not archived, to be wrongly displayed as part of the pages archived in the past.

To avoid this, the Archive removes the images of the current Web that the browser displays on archived pages.

Did I surf away from the Archive?

You can check whether you are browsing on archived pages in 2 ways:

if the address you see in the address bar is from the Archive (e.g.: http://arquivo.pt/wayback/wayback/id39index1?pos=3&l=en)
if there is a yellow bar of the Archive at the top of the archived page

If none of these conditions are met then you are browsing the current Web, that is, outside the Archive.

Why are there videos that seem to have been archived but are not able to play?

Because the technology used for embedding videos in pages normally does not allow the videos to be archived.

Can I use forms in an archived web site?

No. As only the contents published on the Web are archived, it is not possible to reproduce the functionality of mechanisms that rely on databases, such as forms.