The hypertext ecosystem is inherently dynamic, with digital content continuously evolving and disappearing. Web archiving and digital libraries serve as crucial infrastructures for preserving hypertext structures, enabling scholarly research on the evolution of hyperlinked content, and supporting knowledge continuity across various domains.

This workshop will explore cutting-edge approaches in web archiving and their intersection with hypertext research, emphasizing AI-driven preservation, user engagement with digital archives, decentralized archival systems, and ethical considerations. WADL 2025 will feature interactive sessions, hands-on demonstrations, and cross-disciplinary discussions that directly align with ACM Hypertext 2025 themes, including hypertext history, digital storytelling, automation, decentralized hypertext, and ethical concerns in web preservation.

WADL 2025 will provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, and archivists to collaborate on the design and implementation of tools, standards, and frameworks for web archiving and digital libraries, with a specific emphasis on hypertext structures and their preservation. The workshop will cover the full lifecycle of web-based content, from creation and publishing to archiving, access, and analysis. WADL 2025 will cover all topics of interest, including but not limited to:

continue to build a diverse community of people integrating web archiving with digital libraries,

help attendees learn about useful methods, systems, and software in this area,

help define and outline future research and practice in this area, to enable more high-quality web archiving,

produce an archival publication that will help advance technology and practice, and

promote synergistic efforts including collaborative projects and proposals.

The objectives of this workshop include the following.

Enhancing Hypertextual Archives: Exploring how web archives serve as historical repositories of hypertext content and how link-based data can be analyzed over time.

Leveraging AI and NLP in Digital Libraries: Investigating how machine learning and NLP techniques can improve web archive searchability, classification, and metadata extraction.

Decentralized Web Archiving: Discussing the role of blockchain, peer-to-peer (P2P) storage, and federated models in building resilient web archives.

Ethical and Social Implications of Web Archiving: Addressing misinformation, censorship, diversity, and biases in digital preservation.

Interactive and User-Centric Archival Interfaces: Exploring hyperlinked knowledge graphs, linked open data, and immersive storytelling techniques that leverage web archives.

This workshop directly aligns with ACM Hypertext 2025 themes:

Hypertext & Web History – Studying the evolution of linked content and its preservation.

Digital Storytelling & Memory – Leveraging web archives for narratives and historical analysis.

AI & Automation – Applying machine learning and NLP to improve archiving and retrieval.

Decentralized and Distributed Hypertext – Exploring blockchain and P2P models for resilient archiving.

Social & Ethical Implications – Addressing biases, misinformation, and ethical concerns in archiving.

By explicitly integrating hypertextual methodologies into web archiving research, this workshop will strengthen the connections between the Hypertext, Digital Libraries, and Web Science communities.

Mat Kelly is an assistant professor at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University. He has been heavily involved in organizational (e.g., program chair [1]) and refereeing roles in communities like those at the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries and is a managing editor at the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL). He was a co-organizer of the two previous iterations of the WADL workshop, held at JCDL 2023 [5] and 2022 [8]. He has led as PI on studies funded by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) exploring the dynamics of preserving online advertisements [6] and personalized, ephemeral web content [7]. More information can be found at: https://matkelly.com. Brenda Reyes Ayala holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of North Texas. She is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She is a Program Committee Member of JCDL, was co-chair of WADL 2023, and was Volunteer Chair of JCDL in 2018. She leads the project “Preserving our digital heritage: Improving the detection of quality problems in web archives”, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In the past she has worked as a web archivist at the University of North Texas Libraries and the National Library of Spain. More information can be found at https://reyesayala.github.io.

In recent years, interest in web archiving and digital libraries has grown significantly. We anticipate an attendance of approximately 30-35 participants, including a strong representation of students.

Submissions should be between 3-5 pages for a 15-minute presentation and one page for posters and lightning talks. Submissions will use the ACM Proceedings template1. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by the program committee, and accepted contributions will be compiled into the WADL program. We anticipate the program to include aspects from multiple disciplines such as Computer Science, Library and Information Science, Web Science, Social Sciences, History, Journalism, etc.

We propose a full-day workshop in hybrid format. We anticipate invited speakers, presentations of selected papers and posters, as well as demonstrations and panels. We plan to schedule a mix of pre-recorded and live in-person presentations (10-15 minutes each), ensuring ample time for discussion and interaction. In addition, we plan to have a small poster session where virtual and in-person attendees can present early-stage work.

The most recent related workshop, WADL 2023 [5] was held as a hybrid, in-person/virtual event2, in conjunction with ACM/IEEE-CS JCDL 2023. This event consisted of the presentation of 5 peer-reviewed and accepted papers as well as lightning and drop-in talks by attendees both in-person at the event and remotely attending. The agenda remains available at https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2023.html. WADL 2022 was held virtually due to the pandemic, but hosted 13 peer-reviewed paper talks and two invited presentations throughout the full-day session. The schedule remains available at https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2022.html. Likewise, schedules for previous iterations of the workshop from 20203, 20194, 20185, 20176, and 20167 are available at the links provided. While the workshop has often coincided with JCDL, the authors seek to expand the community of interested researchers that attend ACM Hypertext. In the 2023 iteration of the conference, we received very positive feedback from participants and are therefore strongly encouraged to continue the workshop in 2025. Two previous WADL meetings resulted in the publication of a special issue in the IEEE TCDL Bulletin such as in 2016 [4] and 2015 [3] and the workshop organizers are motivated to revitalize this effort with WADL 2025. Other workshop proceedings will be openly accessible from VTechWorks8, Virginia Tech’s institutional repository. A previous workshop, WIRE [9], focused on research of archival holdings and on making use of archives that preserve the web. The first workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Libraries, WADL 2013, led to a summary [2] after a group responded to the call for meeting as part of the JCDL 2013 workshop program. An earlier similar workshop at a prior JCDL conference took place in Ottawa in 20119, partly as a result of the emergence of a cooperative to explore web archiving10. Broader in scope but related are the annual General Assembly meetings of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)11. In addition, various sponsored programs have connected, like a closely related initiative12 funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

As was done for previous WADL events, the organizers will evaluate venues to offer an opportunity to publish invited contributions that were presented in their preliminary stages at the workshop. In the past, the workshop has also led to a call for contributions for a special issue of IJDL. We intend to invest this effort again and edit an IJDL special issue on web archiving following WADL 2025.

Our previous committee members have help to ensure a quality program for the workshop that is tailored toward its topic. The following individuals have previously expressed a willingness to evaluate submissions to the workshop. We anticipate requesting their service for peer-review of WADL 2025 submissions.

Sumitra Duncan, Frick Art Reference Library

Joshua Finnell, Colgate University

Shawn M. Jones, Google

Lauren Ko, University of North Texas Libraries

Michael L. Nelson, Old Dominion University

Alexander Nwala, College of William & Mary

Nicholas Taylor, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Michele C. Weigle, Old Dominion University

Laura Wrubel, Stanford University

We anticipate our program to be as inclusive as possible to represent the international community of web archiving and digital libraries researchers and practitioners. As with previous iterations of WADL, we anticipate hosting a hybrid conference. To facilitate this, we request technical assistance to ensure seamless virtual participation while the primary event takes place at the Hypertext conference venue in Chicago.

[fn1] 1https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template [fn2] 2https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2023.html [fn3] 3https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2020.html [fn4] 4https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2019.html [fn5] 5https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2018.html [fn6] 6https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2017.html [fn7] 7https://fox.cs.vt.edu/wadl2016.html [fn8] 8https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/ [fn9] 9http://infolab.stanford.edu/wac/ [fn10] 10https://cs.harding.edu/wag2011/ [fn11] 11https://netpreserve.org/ [fn12] 12https://library.columbia.edu/collections/web-archives.html