International Internet Preservation Consortium publishes WARC file format

In 1996, Mike Burner and Brewster Kahle explained the format used by the Internet Archive for aggregating files collected when archiving Websites. By convention, archive files were named with an ".arc" extension. The file format was designed to be self contained, extensible, streamable, and viable. Read more.

Recently, the International Internet Preservation Consortium announced the publication of the WARC file format, an extension to the ARC format, as an international standard: ISO 28500:2009, Information and documentation -- WARC file format.

The WARC format will standardize the way billions of resources collected from the web are structured, managed, and stored. New possibilities offered by the WARC format include recording of arbitrary metadata, management of duplicates and of migrated records, segmentation of records, and allocation of an identifier for every contained file. Read more about the International Internet Preservation Consortium.