Recommendations for authors to enable web archiving

A web archive works similarly to a web search engine like Google. Therefore, the presented recommendations contribute to create contents that can be correctly processed of both these types of systems.

The following recommendations were classified in fundamental and advisable. They were written with the purpose of helping any author. Please contact us if you have any doubt.

Web site organization

• One link for each content (fundamental)
• Crawler-friendly homepage (fundamental)
• Maintain address to the same content across time (advisable)
• Robots Exclusion Protocol to indicate access restrictions (advisable)

Web page content

• Links published HTML or XHTML (fundamental)
• Texts published using textual formats (fundamental)
• Media type and character set encoding correctly identified (fundamental)
• Metadata describing the content (advisable)
• Format specification compliance (advisable)
• Date of publication (advisable)
• Adequate formats for preservation (advisable)

 General

• Usability and accessibility for people with disabilities (advisable)

Related Work

• National Library of Australia, Safeguarding Australia’s Web Resources: Guidelines for Creators and Publishers, 2002.
  
• National Library of Australia, Managing Web Resources for Persistent Access, 2002.
• J. A. Smith, M. L. Nelson, Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources, 2008.