I don’t know about you, but I’m a pack-rat when it comes to research. Everything that ever comes across my desk gets filed away somewhere. To avoid boxes and boxes of such crap I usually just scan things and forget about them. But over the past few years I’ve developed a new problem. As more and more of my reading is conducted online, I worry about not being able to find things again. Web sites disappear, or get updated. News articles sometimes go into pay-only archives. And, more importantly, I usually just can’t remember where I saw something.

The best solution is to save a copy of the web page on your computer. Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger and cheaper and cheaper, so it doesn’t really cost anything to keep local copies of web pages – even with the pictures included. The advantage is that I can then file pages away by topic or, if I need to, do a full-text search on my entire archive to find that one web page I just can’t find. Think of it as Googling my own private web.

But how to save pages? If you just copy and paste the text you often lose important formatting information which makes the page unreadable. Not to mention that you might loose the links in the text. You can save the page as an HTML file on your desktop, but then you might not get the images or other parts of the document which you need. And even if you save the page as a “web archive” – a feature offered by Internet Explorer and also by Safari for Mac OS X, you can’t easily browse through the pages you saved. You have to store them all away some where on your desktop and open them individually in your web browser to find out what is inside.

The solution? Scrapbook! Scrapbook is an extension for Firefox which works on all computer platforms. Here is how the New York Times described Scrapbook back in April:

ScrapBook, a free add-on to the Firefox browser …, lets you archive Web pages about as simply as creating bookmarks.

The program opens a pane along the left side of the browser; you can drag pages into it or capture them with a couple of mouse clicks.

The archived pages can be organized in folders, viewed offline and edited with tools that may be useful to researchers, like a yellow highlighter and an in-line commenter for adding notes to selected areas. The pages are saved in HTML format; they retain links and other qualities of Web pages.

It is the ease of use which makes Scrapbook such a pleasure. To save a web page you don’t have to give it a second thought. This tutorial [PDF] makes it seem much more complicated than it really is, but is a useful reference to learn about many of Scrapbook’s advanced features. With Scrapbook you don’t even need to save an entire web page, you can select a portion of a page for archiving if you like. You can even download a page along with all its linked media files, including PDFs, images, music, and whatever else it might include. It also offers full-text search of your entire archive. You can even link to archived pages for your own research notes, making it possible to work extensively off-line.

Because Scrapbook uses standard HTML you can view its archives in any browser. All you need to do is tell it to export its Table of Contents to an HTML file that you can use to navigate the archives. Over the years I’ve learned not to trust my data to any software which doesn’t use open formats which make it easy to move your data if the software becomes obsolete, or something better comes along.

Did I mention that Scrapbook is free?

Here is a full list of all the extensions I use with Firefox. (Note: Many extensions won’t work with the current beta release of Firefox. I recommend sticking with the stable release: 1.0.6.)