  Web archives are a valuable resource for researchers of various disciplines.
However, to use them as a scholarly source, researchers require a tool that
provides efficient access to Web archive data for extraction and derivation of
smaller datasets. Besides efficient access we identify five other objectives
based on practical researcher needs such as ease of use, extensibility and
reusability.
  Towards these objectives we propose ArchiveSpark, a framework for efficient,
distributed Web archive processing that builds a research corpus by working on
existing and standardized data formats commonly held by Web archiving
institutions. Performance optimizations in ArchiveSpark, facilitated by the use
of a widely available metadata index, result in significant speed-ups of data
processing. Our benchmarks show that ArchiveSpark is faster than alternative
approaches without depending on any additional data stores while improving
usability by seamlessly integrating queries and derivations with external
tools.
