  Text extraction from web pages has many applications, including web crawling
optimization and document clustering. Though much has been written about the
acquisition of content from live web pages, content acquisition of archived web
pages, known as mementos, remains a relatively new enterprise. In the course of
conducting a study with almost 700,000 web pages, we encountered issues
acquiring mementos and extracting text from them. The acquisition of memento
content via HTTP is expected to be a relatively painless exercise, but we have
found cases to the contrary. We also find that the parsing of HTML, already
known to be problematic, can be more complex when one attempts to extract the
text of mementos across many web archives, due to issues involving different
memento presentation behaviors, as well as the age of the HTML in their
mementos. For the benefit of others acquiring mementos across many web
archives, we document those experiences here.
