6. Quality Assurance (QA)

About this document

This document is a procedural guide and reference source for issues specific to assuring the quality of specialist art historical resources collected from the web by the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), using the Internet Archive’s software service Archive-It. It is best used as a companion to the NYARC Web Archiving QA Report Form in the conduct of reviewing, documenting, and improving the quality of archived resources.

Drafts and revisions

• Revised February 2022

• Revised for publication: January 5, 2015

• Draft for internal review: December 15, 2014

Acknowledgements

These guidelines and procedures were drafted with the generous advice and from the precedents and preliminary research provided by peers throughout the web archiving community. For their contributions to this process, NYARC wishes to especially thank Archive-It, the British Library, the Columbia University Web Resources Collection Program, the Government Publishing Office, the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, the University of North Texas Libraries, and the University of Texas at Austin Libraries.

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction

• II. QA Procedures

  • 1. Assess scope quality and capture completeness with crawl reports

  • 2. Assess capture completeness and render quality through web browsing

  • 3. Improve capture, behavior, and appearance

  • 4. Document QA process, problems, and recommendations

• III. Known quality problems and improvement strategies

  • A. Problems scoping content for crawl and capture

  • B. Problems crawling and capturing live content from the web

  • C. Problems rendering captured content in an archival environment

  • D. Problems managing web archival tools and processes

• IV. Further reading