Quality Assurance Guide for the UK Web Archive: An introduction to reviewing the quality of archived websites through ACT

Abstract

• This guidebook contains strategies that can be used to support Quality Assurance (QA) undertaken with the UK Web Archive’s Annotation Curation Tool (ACT). The guide has several aims: to provide an introduction to web archiving generally and to the UK Web Archive in particular; to provide hints and tips on diagnosing issues with problem captures and to provide an overview of tools and techniques that can be used to resolve issues. It is hoped that this guide will assist in the development and training of current staff in addition to new staff becoming involved in web archiving at partner institutions. This is by no means an exhaustive guide, but an overview of resources and should act as a good starting point for curators facing difficulties when reviewing archived content. The guide assumes that the user has a basic knowledge of the Annotation Curation Tool (ACT) and is intended for those who already have had some hands-on experience of web archiving. This QA Guide was completed in December 2017, since then the UK Web Archive moved from using the Open Wayback service to replay archived websites to Python Wayback. Python Wayback replays a more complete version of the archived website compared to Open Wayback so some of the issues outlined in the guide, such as displaying style sheets on WordPress based web content no longer applies. You can read more about Python Wayback on the UK Web Archive blog: https://blogs.bl.uk/webarchive/2018/02/a-new-playback-tool-for-the-uk-web-archive.html Some third party plugins and tools are suggested in the QA Guide, the function of these were accurate at the time of publication but might not be applicable now.