Archive-It Utilities

Archive-It Utilties is a Python library for extracting information from Archive-It collections. Most work is currently done through a single class ArchiveItCollection, which performs screen-scraping in order to acquire general collection metadata, seed lists, and seed metadata.

Installation

This package is called aiu on PyPI. Installation is handled via pip:

pip install aiu

Using the ArchiveItCollection class

The heart of Archive-It Utilities is a class named ArchiveItCollection that has many methods for extracting information about an Archive-It collection using its collection identifier.

For example, to use iPython to get information about Archive-It collection number 5728, one can execute the following:

In [1]: from aiu import ArchiveItCollection

In [2]: aic = ArchiveItCollection(5728)

In [3]: aic.get_collection_name()
Out[3]: 'Social Media'

In [4]: aic.get_collectedby()
Out[4]: 'Willamette University'

In [5]: aic.get_archived_since()
Out[5]: 'Apr, 2015'

In [6]: aic.is_private()
Out[6]: False

In [7]: seeds = aic.list_seed_uris()

In [8]: len(seeds)
Out[8]: 107

From this session we now know that the collection's name is Social Media, it was collected by Willamette University, it has been archived since April 2015, it is not private, and it has 107 seeds.

For now, examine the source in aiu/archiveit_collection.py for a full list of methods to use with this class.