Web-Archiving: A Short Guide to Proxy Mode

Defining Proxy Mode:

Proxy Mode is an ‘offline browsing’ mode  which provides an intuitive way of checking the quality and comprehensiveness of any web-archived content captured. Proxy Mode enables you to view documents within an Archive-It collection and ascertain which page elements have been captured effectively and which are still being ‘pulled’ from the live site.

Why Use Proxy Mode?

Carrying out QA (Quality Assurance) without proxy mode could lead to a sense of false reassurance about the data that has been captured, since some page elements displayed may actually present those being taken from the live site as opposed to a desired archival capture. Proxy Mode should therefore be employed as part of the standard QA process since it prevents these live-site redirects from occurring and provides a true account of the data captured.

Using Proxy Mode:

Proxy Mode is easy to setup and involves simply downloading an add-on that can be accessed here. There is also an option to setup Proxy Mode manually in Firefox or Chrome.

Potential Issues and Solutions:

Whilst using Proxy Mode a couple of members of the BLWA team (myself included) had issues viewing certain URLs in Proxy Mode often receiving  a ‘server not found’ error message.  After corresponding with Archive-It I discovered that Proxy Mode often has trouble loading https URLs. With this in mind I loaded the same URL but this time removed the ‘s’ from https and reloaded the page. Once Proxy Mode had been enabled this seemed to rectify the issue.

There was one particular instance however where this fix didn’t work and the same ‘server not found’ error message returned, much to my dismay! Browsers can sometimes save a specific version of the URL as the preferred version and will direct to it automatically. I discovered it was just a case of clearing the browser’s: cache, cookies, offline website data and site preferences. Once this had been done I was able to load the site once again using Proxy Mode #bigachievements.

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