With the recent Symposium: 404/File Not Found: Link Rot,
Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent at Georgetown Law School,
it’s important to take into consideration the future archivability of the
webpages you and your institution create. We all take for granted the fluidity
of the web and frequently forget that content on websites changes, and is lost,
constantly. This is not just restricted to news sites, but impacts everything
from our institutional sites to government and court sites. Many organizations
are working to preserve the content on the internet, from individual websites,
to the documents, videos, and images that they includes. And they seek to do this
in as authentic a way as possible as well as to give future users the ability to
access and interact with the sites in the way it was originally intended.
To assist in the creation of websites that promote
archiving, Stanford University Libraries recently published a set of Recommendations
for Web Builders to Improve the Archivability of Their Content, with
archivability referring to “the ease with which the content, structure, and
front-end presentation(s) of a website can be preserved and later re-presented,
using contemporary web archiving tools.” This documentation builds on other
resources relating to web archiving and seeks to improve collective web
preservation efforts.
