WEB ARCHIVES IN RECONSTRUCTING HISTORY OF VIRTUAL MUSEUMS: POTENTIAL AND LIMITATIONS

Web archives are repositories of unique sources on the history of the information society, including the cultural segment of the World Wide Web. The relevance of studying the web history of museum information resources refers to the need to understand the past and contemporary processes of the development of the museum's digital environment in order to more effectively build strategies for future advancement with a valuable impact on society. The article, for the first time, attempts to assess the information potential of web archives for studying the web history of virtual museums and discusses the limitations that prevent the reconstruction of their web history. Web archives are designed to observe web pages and web sites saved at a certain point in time; they analyze the structure and content of the museum web, interpret the visual aids and sections' titles, and track statistics of publication activity. Tracing changes in the role and significance of the digital environment in museum activities, as well as trends in the development of museums, and predicting future trajectories are possible based on the analysis of the dynamics of museums' web content. At the same time, the peculiarities of search engines in web archives, technical restrictions, incompatibility of modern software with earlier formats, limits on scanning information on the World Wide Web to save it, uneven preservation by domain zones in the Internet Archive, and the lack of specialized web preservation programs at national and regional levels restraint the possibility of a comprehensive study of the history of virtual museums. The author concludes that it is necessary to expand national web archiving programs in favour of a more detailed preservation of the cultural segment of the web as a digital cultural heritage, as well as the content of social networks and mobile applications, for future use by researchers.