Reed Technology offers web archiving tool to beat Archive.org

Back in December, Reed Technology—a local firm that develops systems to assist clients with a high volume of documentation—launched its most market-facing service to date: a web archiving service that allows companies to store dynamic content for historical record keeping, and more important, to save face if they get hit with a suit related to their web content.
Using a white-labelled third-party service, the company is hoping to offer a more feature-rich and focused model than Internet Archive, a academic project that has been storing static HTML pages across the Internet since the 90s. Reed Technology Web Archiving Service offers a deeper repository, saving images and back-links that are missing from the Internet Archive.
The tool archives everything, including web site presence and social media channels, ensuring that any public-facing online communications are officially on-the-record.
“From a corporation’s point of view, someone can make a claim about something that was on their website two years ago,” says Reed’s Vice President of Operations and Technology Services David Ballai.

The technology users spiders and scraping tools to collect everything on a site, including links. It preserves those links—hosted locally—as active, so the archived version is fully-functional.
And the service follows up-to-date legal decisions, like a February 2010 precedent for website content to be treated the same as any other legal, electronic document.
“We have spent a fair amount of time thinking through the implications of copyright infringement activities, privacy policies. The courts look at public content in digital form much they same they do in other forms,” Ballai says.
The Horsham-based company, which was acquired by LexisNexis in the late 90s, first came across our inbox while reporting an inspiring soft feature about a series of information technology classes for young, high school or equivalency graduates who were unemployed and not seeking secondary education. The firm was one of the internship providers, where a student learned basic IT skills and tested for Microsoft Certification.
The product’s marketing pages looked sharp when Technically Philly first got the announcement email; and it came, admittedly, as a surprise, when we spotted the news on ReadWriteWeb soon after.
It was, after all, what one would consider a business-to-business service, one unlikely to entice the readership of a consumer-focused outlet like RWW. And though the tool clearly has effects outside of a business-to-business market, that’s how the company plans on positioning the service in the near-term.
“We are positioning this as a tool for large organizations to manage their ligitation and complance risk, but when you look at a service offering like this, it could very well be just as interesting to the individual,” Ballai says.
After the technology was developed by a partner, it became clear that Reed’s contacts in the document-processing world, like the LexisNexis network and the legal industry, and its storied history in the archiving of paper materials, would make it a logical distribution pipeline.
“We’re in an organization [LexisNexis] with more than 3,000 attornies worldwide, and very sensitive to the nature of risk and issues associated with digital content,” Ballai says.