Frequently Asked Questions

Help me! I clicked on an icon and ended up on this strange site!

The author of the website you come from once used our service to check if it was ready to be archived and the page passed validation. The author was then authorized to use the icon on that page, as a claim of validity. The icon is used as a link back to the validation service, so that the author can revalidate whenever necessary. This is why, by clicking on the icon, you followed a link to the current validation results for the page you came from. If the results are not currently positive, you could mention it to the owner of the website.

What is digital preservation?

Digital preservation can be understood as the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary. Learn more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_preservation.

What is web archiving?

Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web and ensuring the collection is preserved in an archive, such as an archive site, for future researchers, historians, and the public. Learn more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_archiving.

What is ArchiveReady and what it does?

ArchiveReady is a web application that checks if a website is archivable. This means to check if it is easy for web archiving projects to access and preserve it. In order to check this, ArchiveReady validates a number of web page characteristics such as standards compliance and accessibility.

Why should I check if my website is archive ready?

Your website contains valuable information that needs to be preserved for future generations. In order to achieve this, a number of national and international organizations are actively pursuing web archiving. If you care for the preservation of your content, you should enable them to do their work better and make it easier for them to archive your website.

I've already checked my website with the W3C Markup Validation Service. Why do I need to check it with ArchiveReady?

Well, checking the markup of your website is one of the main factors to ensure quality and archivability, but it is not the only one.

Modern websites have a large number of attributes that affect archivability and web preservation, such as:

Who owns/maintains ArchiveReady?

ArchiveReady was designed and implemented by Vangelis Banos. Vangelis is working on digital preservation and archives. He draws inspiration from current and previous projects such as: BlogForever, OAI-PMH Validator, and openarchives.gr.

What other services are there to check if a web page is archivable?

There isn't any other service according to my knowledge. If you are aware of one, please contact Vangelis Banos to add it here. There is a number of services that help validate the correctness of specific file types. Here is an incomplete list of them:

How does ArchiveReady work?

ArchiveReady is working as a web bot, accessing a Website and trying to understand if certain technologies and page attributes are there.

How do I send feedback/bug reports about ArchiveReady?

Please contact the creator and maintain of ArchiveReady, Vangelis Banos.