Archiving a websites interactivity?

As more and more of culture and human experience is mediated through the web, many memory organizations are archiving websites for the historical record. However, most of these archives are simply snapshots of the content on the sites at the time, the, more or less, static content that is publicly available.

However, there is another aspect of a website that is not being archived. The logs of users actions and interactions with a site tell a rich tale about what was popular and what was not, when things were used and how they were used by the site audience. It’s the type of rich data a modern historian would love to have about historic newspapers, for example.

Do humanities researchers think this kind of data might be valuable to future researchers? What other kinds of “hidden” information about a website could be useful to archive? The admin interface to understand what web site stuff were seeing when they created the content? I’d like this session to be about exploring this idea.