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In 2020, Rhizome added renamed their Webrecorder.io. project, started in 2015, to Conifer. Conifer lets its users “create high-fidelity, interactive captures of any web site you browse and a platform to make those captured websites accessible.” Conifer is powered by its users and gives the power to “create, curate, and share their own collections of web materials. This can even include items that would be only revealed after logging in or performing complicated actions on a web site.” This tool also lets users save items with “complex scripting, such as embedded videos, fancy navigation, or 3D graphics,” which “have a much higher success rate for capture with Conifer than with traditional web archives.”

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How Conifer works

According to their user guide, Conifer works by putting web pages into “sessions." These "sessions" work by “requests sent by the browser and responses from the web are captured while you are interacting with sites.” Conifer defines a collection as a series of these sessions. When someone wants to view the sessions, Conifer “makes the browser request resources from the collection instead of the live web. Viewers of a collection should be able to repeat any action during access that were performed during capture.”

Managing Sessions and Uploading Data

Conifer also lets their users manage their sessions through the session management page and delete certain sessions. However, “Deletion is permanent, there are no additional copies or means to recover deleted content …  deleting a session removes ALL resources captured during that session.”

Conifer allows users to upload data in multiple formats, including:

·       WARCs created with any web archiving tool (an ISO standard for web arhciving)

·       ARC files (the predecessor of WARC)

·       HAR files (a browser and web site debugging protocol format)

Capturing with Conifer

Conifer offers different approaches to capturing with their software. Through a browser, one can capture

·       Via your local browser

·       Via remote browser

·       Via the ArchiveWeb.page desktop app

The choice of browser effects how the data will be captured. Conifer states that “There are four factors in a capture session: the browser that is operated by the user, its connection to the web archiving backend that writes the data, network location, and user identity.” The browser performs the network requests, and anything that is not requested cannot be captured. Ad blocker and privacy features can affect these requests. Also, webpages could appear differently due to the capabilities of each different browser. Conifer also gives the option for users to use their remote browser, which lets users “use the exact same browser for both capture and access.” These browsers run in the cloud and are pre-configured by Conifer for use in capturing websites.

There are also different ways that the browser can connect to Conifer: through “rewriting mode” or “proxy mode.” In the Rewriting mode, “all resources the browser requests are changed on the fly so that instead of reaching out to the original URL on the live web, everything goes through the conifer.rhizome.org web archiving server.” Proxy mode “has the web archiving backend connected to the browser via a web proxy…The browser can make requests as usual and the web archiving backend will have access to all of them, with almost no rewriting required. This makes proxy mode generally a more stable and reliable capture method that doesn’t require constant updating.”

Conifer can also capture content when a user is logged into a website but say that a website may look different depending on if the user is logged in or not. However, Conifer warns that “You may log in to websites during a session, however, do note that your credentials may be captured as data within your collection…If you need to capture a site that requires login, consider creating a throwaway account just for the purpose of capturing.”

Capturing Flash

Despite that Adobe Flash Player went offline at the end of 2020, Conifer can still capture sites that used Flash, saying “As long as a Flash site remains online it will still be accessible and able to be archived … even after the deadline.”

Uses

In their article, Archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data: Challenges and opportunities with curating the UK web archive, Nicola Jayne Bingham and Helena Byrne state that programs such as Conifer offer “potential for collecting and creating much more heritage; in practice however, ‘recording’ websites is a manual, extremely time-consuming process and can only be used very selectively due to resource constraints.” However, Byrne and Bingham also state that “Conifer has great potential to democratise the web archiving process as websites archived by individuals external to the LDLs can be added to UKWA, creating possibilities for more diversity within the archive.”

The Conifer tool also has been suggested for use in Special Interest Archival groups, such as the group for art. According to Sumitra Duncan, founder of the Web Archiving Special Interest Group, “For the last few years we have been toying with the idea of using … Conifer service … to create a SIG web archive collection that we can use as a teaching tool for members who are new to web archiving. Unfortunately, a lack of ‘staff’ time and funds for long-term data storage has prevented us from enacting this idea in the past and still applies.”