Since our collaboration with political science researchers using web archives to understand the 2014 U.S. congressional elections, we've seen (and, hopefully, helped foster) growing interest in web archives as primary source material. This trend parallels a similar refocusing by other web archiving programs toward enhancing access services and facilitating research use. The maturity and the variety of these efforts, as well as the accumulating body of resulting research, provide an expanding list of references with which to orient and entice prospective researchers to the potential of working with web archives.

For the last couple of research consultations, I've wanted to be able to provide a single starting point with light annotation of relevant links, covering web archive data formats, APIs, tools, tutorials, and research examples - essentially, the same information I might send in a follow-up message, only more comprehensive and better organized. Breaking the marginal suspense of my casual foreshadowing, I've since created just such a resource.

Please check out the new research resources section of the Web Archiving microsite, with sub-sections on data formats and APIs, tools, and tutorials and examples.