eprints2archives 1.0.0

Send EPrints URLs to the Internet Archive and other archives

eprints2archives

A program that can obtain records from an EPrints server and send them to public web archiving services such as the Internet Archive and others.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Usage
• Known issues and limitations
• Getting help
• Contributing
• License
• Authors and history
• Acknowledgments

Introduction

One approach to improving preservation and distribution of EPrints server contents is to archive the web pages in sites such as the Internet Archive. Eprints2archives is a self-contained program to do exactly that. It contacts a given EPrints server, obtains the list of documents it serves (optionally filtered based on such things as modification date), and sends document URLs to archiving sites. It is written in Python 3 and works over a network using an EPrints server's REST API.

Installation

The instructions below assume you have a Python interpreter installed on your computer; if that's not the case, please first install Python and familiarize yourself with running Python programs on your system.

On Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems, you should be able to install eprints2archives with pip. To install eprints2archives from the Python package repository (PyPI), run the following command:

python3 -m pip install eprints2archives --upgrade

As an alternative to getting it from PyPI, you can use pip to install eprints2archives directly from GitHub, like this:

python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/caltechlibrary/eprints2archives.git --upgrade

After installing it, on Linux and macOS systems you should end up with a program called eprints2archives in a location normally searched by your terminal shell. You should be able to run eprints2archives from the shell like any other program. On Windows, or if eprints2archives ended up in a location not normally searched by your terminal shell, you should still be able to invoke the program as a Python module. For example,

python3 -m eprints2archives -h

Usage

For help with usage at any time, run eprints2archives with the option -h (or /h on Windows).

eprints2archives contacts an EPrints REST server whose network API is accessible at the URL given as the value to option -a (or /a on Windows). eprints2archives must be given a value for this option; it cannot infer the server address on its own. A typical EPrints server URL has the form https://server.institution.edu/rest.

Accessing some EPrints servers via the API requires supplying a user login and password to the server. By default, this program retrieves them from your operating system's user keyring/keychain. If the login and password for a given EPrints server does not exist from a previous run of eprints2archives, it will ask for the user name and password, and then (unless the -K option – or /K on Windows – is given) store them in your keyring/keychain so that it does not have to ask again in the future. It is also possible to supply the information directly on the command line using the -u and -p options (or /u and /p on Windows), but this is discouraged because it is insecure on multiuser computer systems. (However, if you need to reset the user name and/or password for some reason, use -u with a user name and let it prompt for a password again.) If the EPrints server does not require a user name and password, do not use -u or -p, and supply blank values when prompted for them by eprints2archives. (Empty user name and password are allowed values.)

How the list of records is determined

The EPrints records to be sent to the web archiving services will be limited to the records indicated by the option -i (or /i on Windows). If no -i option is given, this program will use all the records available at the given EPrints server. The value of -i can be one or more integers separated by commas (e.g., -i 54602,54604), or a range of numbers separated by a dash (e.g., -i 1-100, which is interpreted as the list of numbers 1, 2, ..., 100 inclusive), or some combination thereof. The value of the option -i can also be a file, in which case, the file is read to get a list of identifiers.

If the -l option (or /l on Windows) is given, the records will be additionally filtered to return only those whose last-modified date/time stamp is no older than the given date/time description. Valid descriptors are those accepted by the Python dateparser library. Make sure to enclose descriptions within single or double quotes. Examples:

eprints2archives -l "2 weeks ago" -a ....
eprints2archives -l "2014-08-29"  -a ....
eprints2archives -l "12 Dec 2014" -a ....
eprints2archives -l "July 4, 2013" -a ....

If the -s option (or /s on Windows) is given, the records will also be filtered to include only those whose eprint_status field value is one of the listed status codes. Comparisons are done in a case-insensitive manner. Putting a caret character (^) in front of the status (or status list) negates the sense, so that eprints2archives will only keep those records whose <eprint_status> value is not among those given. Examples:

eprints2archives -s archive -a ...
eprints2archives -s ^inbox,buffer,deletion -a ...

Both --lastmod and --status filering are done after the -i argument is processed.

By default, if an error occurs when requesting a record or value from the EPrints server, eprints2archives will keep going, moving on to the next one. Common causes of errors include missing records implied by the arguments to -i, missing files associated with a given record, and files inaccessible due to permissions errors. If the option -e (or /e on Windows) is given, eprints2archives will instead stop upon encountering a missing record, or missing file within a record, or similar errors. The default is to only issue warnings because this is less frustrating for most use-cases.

How URLs are constructed

For every EPrint record, eprints2archives constructs 3 URLs and verifies that they exist on the EPrints server; thus, there may be up to 3 URLs sent to each public web archive for every EPrint record on a server. The URLs are as follows (where SERVER is the server hostname + post number (if any), and N is the id number of the EPrint record):

1. https://SERVER/N
2. https://SERVER/id/eprint/N
3. The value of the field official_url (if any) in the EPrint record.

The first two typically go to the same page on an EPrint server, but web archiving services have no direct mechanism to indicate that a given URL is an alias or redirection for another, so they need to be sent as separate URLs. The value of official_url may be an entirely different URL, which may or may not go to the same location as one of the others. For example, in the CaltechAUTHORS EPrint server, the record at https://authors.library.caltech.edu/85447 has an official_url value of https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20180327-085537493, but the latter is a redirection back to https://authors.library.caltech.edu/85447.

How the destination is determined

eprints2archives has a set of built-in adapters to interact with a number of known public web archiving services. To learn which services eprints2archives knows about, use the option -S (or /S on Windows). By default, the program will send EPrints record URLs to all the known services. The option -d (or /d on Windows) can be used to select one or a list of destination services instead. Lists of services should be separated by commas with no spaces between them; e.g., internetarchive,archivetoday.

By default, eprints2archives will only ask a service to archive a copy of an EPrints record if the service does not already have an archived copy. This makes sense because EPrints records usually change infrequently, and there's little point in repeatedly asking web archives to make new archives. However, if you have reason to want the web archives to re-archive EPrints records, you can use the option -f (or /f on Windows).

eprints2archives will use parallel process threads to query the EPrints server as well as to send records to archiving services. By default, the maximum number of threads used is equal to 1/2 of the number of cores on the computer it is running on. The option -t (or /t on Windows) can be used to change this number. eprints2archives will always use only one thread per web archiving service (and since there are only a few services, only a few threads are usable during that phase of operation), but a higher number of threads can be helpful to speed up the initial data gathering step from the EPrints server.

Beware that there is a lag between when web archives such as Internet Archive receive a URL submission and when a saved copy is made available from the archive. (For Internet Archive, it is 3-10 hours.) If you cannot find a given EPrints page in an archive shortly after running eprints2archives, it may be because not enough time has passed.

Other command-line arguments

To save a report of the articles sent, you can use the option -r (/r on Windows) followed by a file name.

eprints2archives will print informative messages as it works. To limit the messages to warnings and errors only, use the option -q (or /q on Windows). Also, output is color-coded by default unless the -C option (or /C on Windows) is given; this option can be helpful if the color control signals create problems for your terminal emulator.

If given the -@ argument (/@ on Windows), this program will output a detailed trace of what it is doing, and will also drop into a debugger upon the occurrence of any errors. The debug trace will be written to the given destination, which can be a dash character (-) to indicate console output, or a file path.

If given the -V option (/V on Windows), this program will print the version and other information to the console, and exit without doing anything else.

Summary of command-line options

The following table summarizes all the command line options available. (Note: on Windows computers, / must be used as the prefix character instead of -):

Short	Long form opt	Meaning	Default
-aA	--api-urlA	Use A as the server's REST API URL		⚑
-dD	--destD	Send to destination service(s) D	Send to all
-e	--error-out	Stop if encounter missing records	Keep going
-f	--force	Send every record even if copy exists	Skip already-archived records
-iI	--id-listI	Records to get (can be a file name)	Fetch all records from the server
-lL	--lastmodL	Filter by last-modified date/time	Don't filter by date/time
-q	--quiet	Don't print info messages while working	Be chatty while working
-sS	--statusS	Filter by status(s) in S	Don't filter by status
-uU	--userU	User name for EPrints server login	No user name
-pP	--passwordU	Password for EPrints proxy login	No password
-C	--no-color	Don't color-code the output	Color the console messages
-K	--no-keyring	Don't use a keyring/keychain	Store login info in keyring
-S	--services	Print list of known services and exit	Do other actions instead
-V	--version	Print program version info and exit	Do other actions instead
-@OUT	--debugOUT	Debugging mode; write trace to OUT	Normal mode	⚐

⚑   Required argument.
⚐   To write to the console, use the character - as the value of OUT; otherwise, OUT must be the name of a file where the output should be written.

Return values

This program exits with a return code of 0 if no problems are encountered. It returns a nonzero value otherwise, following conventions used in shells such as bash which only understand return code values of 0 to 255. The following table lists the possible return values:

0 = success -- program completed normally
1 = no network detected -- cannot proceed
2 = encountered a bad or missing value for an option
3 = file error -- encountered a problem with a file
4 = the user interrupted the program's execution
5 = an exception or fatal error occurred

Known issues and limitations

Some services impose severe rate limits on URL submissions, and there is nothing that eprints2archives can do about it. For example, at the time of this writing, Archive.Today only allows 2 URLs to be submitted every 5 minutes. If you plan on sending a large number of URLs, it may be more convenient to use a separate eprints2archives process with the -d option to select only one destination, and let it run in its own terminal window.

Getting help

If you find an issue, please submit it in the GitHub issue tracker for this repository.

Contributing

We would be happy to receive your help and participation with enhancing eprints2archives! Please visit the guidelines for contributing for some tips on getting started.

License

Software produced by the Caltech Library is Copyright (C) 2020, Caltech. This software is freely distributed under a BSD/MIT type license. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.

Authors and history

This program was initially written in mid-2020, in response to discussions in Caltech's Digital Library Development group.

The TimeMap parsing code in eprints2archives/services/timemap.py originally came from the Off-Topic Memento Toolkit, by Shawn M. Jones, as it existed on 2020-07-29. The OTMT code is made available according to the MIT license. Acknowledgements and additional information are provided in the file header of eprints2archives/services/timemap.py.

The algorithm and some code for interacting with Archive.Today were borrowed from ArchiveNow, a tool developed by Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University. The authors and contributors of the specific code file used (is_handler.py), as it existed on 2020-07-17, were Mohamed Aturban, Shawn M. Jones, veloute, and evil-wayback. ArchiveNow is made available according to the MIT license. Acknowledgements and additional information are provided in the file header of eprints2archives/services/archivetoday.py.

eprints2archives makes use of numerous open-source packages, without which it would have been effectively impossible to develop eprints2archives with the resources we had. We want to acknowledge this debt. In alphabetical order, the packages are:

• aenum – advanced enumerations for Python
• appdirs – determine the appropriate app dirs on different OSes
• dateparser – parse dates in almost any string format
• distro – get info about the OS distribution running the current computer
• humanize – helps write large numbers in a more human-readable form
• ipdb – the IPython debugger
• keyring – access the system keyring service from Python
• lxml – an XML parsing library for Python
• plac – a command line argument parser
• pydash – kitchen sink of Python utility libraries for doing “stuff”
• pypubsub – a publish-and-subscribe message-passing library for Python
• requests – an HTTP library for Python
• rich – library for writing styled text to the terminal
• setuptools – library for setup.py
• tzlocal – determine your local time zone
• urllib3 – HTTP client library for Python
• validators – data validation package for Python

Acknowledgments

The vector artwork of a cloud and arrow contained within the logo for this repository was created by Vimal from the Noun Project. It is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY 3.0 license.

This work was funded by the California Institute of Technology Library.