We live in an era in which the ways that we can make sense of our past are evolving as more artifacts from that past become digital. At the same time, the responsibilities of traditional gatekeepers who have negotiated the ethics of historical data collection and use, such as librarians and archivists, are increasingly being sidelined by the system builders who decide whether and how to provide access to historical digital collections, often without sufficient reflection on the ethical issues at hand. It is our aim to better prepare system builders to grapple with these issues. This paper focuses discussions around one such digital collection from the dawn of the web, asking what sorts of analyses can and should be conducted on archival copies of the GeoCities web hosting platform that dates to 1994.

Anserini is an open-source information retrieval toolkit built around Lucene to facilitate replicable research. In this demonstration, we examine different architectures for Solr integration in order to address two current limitations of the system: the lack of an interactive search interface and support for distributed retrieval. Two architectures are explored: In the first approach, Anserini is used as a frontend to index directly into a running Solr instance. In the second approach, Lucene indexes built directly with Anserini can be copied into a Solr installation and placed under its management. We discuss the tradeoffs associated with each architecture and report the results of a performance evaluation comparing indexing throughput. To illustrate the additional capabilities enabled by Anserini/Solr integration, we present a search interface built using the open-source Blacklight discovery interface.