This Technical Report defines statistics, terms and quality criteria for Web archiving. It considers the needs and practices across a wide range of organisations such as libraries, archives, museums, research centres and heritage foundations. The examples mentioned are taken from the library sector, because libraries, especially national libraries, have taken up the new task of Web archiving in the context of legal deposit. This should in no way be taken to undermine the important contributions of institutions which are not libraries. Neither does it reduce the principal applicability of this Technical Report for heritage institutions and archiving professionals.
This Technical Report is intended for professionals directly involved in Web archiving, often in mixed teams consisting of library or archive curators, engineers and managerial staff. It is also useful for Web archiving institutions’ funding authorities and external stakeholders. The terminology used in this Technical Report attempts to reflect the wide range of interests and expertise of the audiences, striking a balance between computer science, management and librarianship.
This Technical Report does not consider the management of academic and commercial electronic resources, such as e-journals, e-newspapers or e-books, which are usually stored and processed separately using different management systems. They are regarded as Internet resources and are not addressed in this Technical Report as distinct streams of content of Web archives. Some organisations also collect electronic documents, which may be delivered through the Web, through publisher-based electronic deposits and repository systems. These too are out of scope for this Technical Report. The principles and techniques used for this kind of collecting are indeed very different from those of Web archiving; statistics and quality indicators relevant for one kind of method are not necessarily relevant for the other.
Finally, this Technical Report essentially focuses on Web archiving principles and methods, and does not encompass alternative ways of collecting Internet resources. As a matter of fact, some Internet resources, especially those that are not distributed on the Web (e.g. newsletters distributed as e-mails) are not harvested by Web archiving techniques and are collected by other means that are not described nor analysed in this Technical Report.