Web archiving has traditionally been something done by professionals: national archives, university libraries, and organizations like the Internet Archive have done a tremendous job archiving and making available a wide range of public web resources.

Rhizome now wants to empower regular users to take ownership of the web archiving process, and to take better grasp of access. Webrecorder allows anybody to archive web resources they care about with ease, including things on the other side of logins. This material can be made public on the web, or kept private. Yet in some cases users might want to better control how the web collections they have created are circulating, and maybe want to limit it to a certain community or keep it offline entirely.

With the Webrecorder Player desktop app, web collections downloaded from Webrecorder—and actually any other standards-compliant web archive file in WARC, ARC or HAR format—can be used on the desktop, without an internet connection being required, with the high fidelity quality users have come to expect from Webrecorder.

Use Webrecorder and the Webrecorder Player to:

• Collect and share sensitive online materials with your community
• Archive interactive web resources you are citing in your research work, and bundle them with your  paper
• Create a reading room for web archives
• Archive private communication you conduct via web services and just keep it for yourself

Webrecorder Player is designed to be updated automatically to maintain feature parity with https://webrecorder.io.

In the future, when new changes are deployed to https://webrecorder.io, a new release of Webrecorder Player will be rolled out to ensure the same high-fidelity replay is available to desktop users.

The Webrecorder team would like to thank our user community, participants in and visitors to the Digital Social Memory conference, and all the web archiving professionals that have helped to shape the Webrecorder Player with their feedback.

We are always interested to hear about your use cases, let us know via support@webrecorder.io.

This release has been created with support from Lozana Rossenova (design research), and Raffaele Messuti led the desktop software development effort. Our freshly hired design lead, Pat Shiu, directed UX.