The web is a big and rapidly changing place, so it can be challenging to discover what resources related to a particular event or topic are in need of archiving. Appraisal is an umbrella term for the many processes by which archivists identify records of enduring value for preservation in an archive. DocNow is an appraisal tool for the web.

DocNow allows archivists to tap into conversations in Twitter to help them discover what web resources are in need of archiving. Its goal is to help ensure ethical practices in web archiving by building conversations between archivists and the communities they are documenting.

Architecture

This repository houses the complete DocNow application which is comprised of a few components:

• a client side application (React)
• a server side REST API (Node)
• a document database (ElasticSearch)
• a messaging queue and stats database (Redis)

Production

If you are running DocNow in production you probably will want to check out docnow-ansible which allows you to provision and configure DocNow in the cloud.

Development

To set up DocNow on your workstation you will need to install Git and Docker. Once you've got them installed open a terminal window and follow these instructions:

1. git clone https://github.com/docnow/docnow
2. cd docnow
3. docker-compose up
4. make some ☕️
5. open http://localhost:3000

If you run into an error above

1. sh clean-up.sh

Other known issues

The redis container will occasionally error out and can be resolved with:

sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=1

as root on the host machine

The elasticsearch container will occasionally error out and can be resolved with:

sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144

as root on the host machine