irchiver: A Full-Resolution Personal Web Archive for Users and Researchers

irchiver is a personal web archive tool for users, which also provided an opportunity for information retrieval researchers to access naturalistic long-term browsing histories. It offers users the ability to capture and search their web archives, which are stored in full-resolution images on their local filesystem. Researchers can request these files, or develop a plugin that triggers when a new image is captured. irchiver runs as a Windows background process using a hook and capture technique that works on all 5 major desktop browsers. The first author has been using irchiver for 12 months, encountering unexpected benefits in archive retrieval, change detection, search functionality, and content recovery.