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If your plan is to maintain pages electronically, one of the big
problems is the links within pages.  Links can be either absolute
(including the entire URL to a page) or relative (indicating only the
path necessary to get from the current page to the linked page), and
making sure both types of links continue to work between pages requires
some sort of index.  And an index stored in a proprietary database will
most likely be the most difficult component to maintain over time, since
it will probably be outlived by HTML support.  HTML itself also will
give way to something else pretty soon, but that process will probably
be a bit slower than much of the XML/XHTML hype would suggest. (XML is
great for many things, but it's still pretty complicated for someone who
just wants to throw out a quick, static web page).

A few things that may be concerns for you are things like:

- whether the files themselves are stored outside of a database or
stored as binary large objects (BLOBS) within the database itself,
- whether advertisements or other offending code will be inserted into
the pages themselves,
- whether the software can work through a firewall to reach pages on
intranets or get past the login screen for subsription-based materials
(possible issues if you've made arrangements with an institution to
capture their web pages),
- how the software deals with things like server-side image maps,
embedded images that are served from hosts besides the host of the pages
themselves, javascript, externally linked header information (style
sheets or meta tags), java applets and linked documents stored in
non-HTML formats (e.g. PDF, MS Word),
- whether multiple versions of the content from a given URL can be saved
and managed within the software (a major concern if you want to capture
multiple snapshots of the same site over time).

One site that lists many such tools is Dave Central under "offline
readers"
http://www.davecentral.com/offline.html

A few years ago, a bunch of products hit the market, selling themselves
as offline browsers.  A significant portion of those products have
either been discontinued or bought up by other companies, to be
integrated into other browser, web development or content management
software (e.g Surfbot, which was bought by Oracle and seems to have been
built into Oracle Mobile Agents
http://technet.oracle.com/doc/lite/oma/).
I think several companies went out of business or shifted their focus
when they realized there wasn't as much money to be made from
advertisement-based business models for offline browsers as they first
thought.  I'm sure the adoption of unlimited access policies by many
Internet service providers didn't help things either.

Some others that I've run across which might (or might not) have
promise.  Some would probably only make sense if they were also being
used for other file management:

Folio Builder - lots of capture and integration into folio infobase
format, not just Web pages, maintains relative links
http://www.fiengroup.com/41build.htm

Lotus Weblicator - built around a Notes 4.x database, where all the data
is stored
http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/weblicator

Several from Tympani Development Inc.
http://www.tympani.com/products.html

One product used by a project to capture web sites for the Wilcox
Collection at the University of Kansas is called Teleport Pro, which
John Thiesen mentioned:
http://www.tenmax.com/
They've had pretty good luck with it, though links are occasionally
managed incorrectly, and the capture process slows down considerably
once an index of pages becomes large.  This is because the software is
trying to match up all links within pages that point to pages that you
have already captured.  If anyone is interested in finding out more
about their work with Teleport Pro, let me know and I can get you in
touch with them.

=======================================================
Cal Lee
Electronic Records Project Archivist
Kansas State Historical Society
Phone: 785-272-8681, ext. 280         Fax: 785-272-8682
http://da.state.ks.us/itab/erc/
http://www.kshs.org/archives/recmgt.htm
  "Those who forget the past are condemned to reload it."
                      - Nick Montfort, July 2000

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