When a crisis occurs, information flows rapidly in the Web through social media, blogs, and news articles. The shared information captures the reactions, impacts, and responses from the government as well as the public. Later, researchers, scholars, students, and others seek information about earlier events, sometimes for cross-event analysis or comparison. There are very few integrated systems which try to collect and permanently archive the information about an event and provide access to the crisis information at the same time. In this thesis, we describe the CTRnet Digital Library and Archive which aims to permanently archive crisis event information by using Archive-It services and then provide access to the archived information by using LucidWorks Big Data software. Through the Big Data (LWBD) software, we take advantage of text extraction, clustering, similarity, annotation, and indexing services and build digital libraries with the generated metadata that will be helpful for the system stakeholders to locate information about an event.

Through this study, we collected data for 46 crises events using Archive-It. We built a CTRnet DL prototype and its services for the Boston Marathon Bombing" collection by using the components of LucidWorks Big Data. Running LucidWorks Big Data on a 30 node Hadoop cluster accelerates the sub-workflows processing and also provides fault tolerant execution. LWBD sub-workflows, ingest" and extract", processed the textual data present in the WARC files. Other sub-workflows kmeans", simdoc", and annotate" helped in grouping the search-results, deleting the duplicates and providing metadata for additional facets in the CTRnet DL prototype, respectively.