What makes a website "archivable"?
Web archivists here know that not all sites are created equal -- some adhere to standards and conventions that make them easier to crawl, index, and ultimately archive, while others, well, don't :-) The same things that we love about the web -- how open, dynamic, and mutable it is -- can sometimes make it a challenge to fit neatly into a box. This community support site makes it easier to capture otherwise unwieldy online resources through its specific guidance for archiving different types of sites, and further tips and tricks from partners' experience. But what about all of the creators, developers, owners, and donors that want to ensure that their own sites live on? Are there unintrusive ways to make their sites more readily "archivable" right now?
Through their collaborations with their stakeholders on the "live web," Archive-It partners have articulated their own needs and priorities in archivability guides like...
- Archivability - Stanford University Libraries
- Guidelines for Preservable Websites - Columbia University Web Resources Collection Program
- Five Tips for Designing Preservable Websites - Smithsonian Institution
Have you or your organization produced similar guidance? If so, please add to the thread below. It would be great to see more examples of this guidance in practice. And if these and more precedents raise questions or prompt issues and/or success stories, let's discuss them here!
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Here are two additional resources that I like:
Archivist and web developer Ashley Blewer just published this short explainer for the developer community, based on some example cases of less-than-perfectly archivable sites and how they might improve by following generally good web accessibility practice: Accessibility and Archivability.
And if you or your donor aren't sure how accessible or archivable a website might be from a quick glance, you can always plug it into our colleague Vangelis Banos's Archive Ready tool, which scans sites for standards compliance and pinpoints some known issues when they are present.
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See also the Library of Congress's guide, Creating Preservable Websites. The Stanford University Libraries Archivability site is no longer accessible, but the LOC guide links to Web Archivability guidance that was updated and republished by Nicholas Taylor and based on Stanford's Archivability guidelines.
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