How Perceptions of Web Resource Boundaries Differ for Institutional and Personal Archives

What is and is not part of a web resource does not have a simple answer. Exploration of web resource boundaries have shown that people's assessments of resource bounds rely on understanding relationships between content fragments on the same web page and between content fragments on different web pages. This study explores whether such perceptions change based on whether the archive is for personal use or is institutional in nature. This survey explores user expectations when accessing archived web resources. Participants in the study were asked to assume they are making use of an archive provided by an institution tasked with preserving online resources, such as a digital archive that is part of the Library of Congress. Groups of pair web pages presented to the participants. Each group has a primary web page that is the resource being saved by the institutional archive. Each group has several subsequent parts or pages, which we will ask about. Consistent with our previous study on personal archiving, the primary-page content in the study comes from multi-page stories, multi-image collections, product pages with reviews and ratings on separate pages, and short single page writings. Participants were asked to assume the institutional archive wants to preserve the primary page and then answer what else they would expect to be saved along with the primary page. The results show that there are similar expectations for preserving continuations of the main content in personal and institutional archiving scenarios, institutional archives are more likely to be expected to preserve the context of the main content, such as additional linked content, advertisements, and author information.