A quantitative approach to evaluate Website Archivability using the CLEAR+ method

Abstract

Website Archivability (WA) is a notion established to capture the core aspects of a website, crucial in diagnosing whether it has the potential to be archived with completeness and accuracy. In this work, aiming at measuring WA, we introduce and elaborate on all aspects of CLEAR+, an extended version of the Credible Live Evaluation Method for Archive Readiness (CLEAR) method. We use a systematic approach to evaluate WA from multiple different perspectives, which we call Website Archivability Facets. We then analyse archiveready.com, a web application we created as the reference implementation of CLEAR+, and discuss the implementation of the evaluation workflow. Finally, we conduct thorough evaluations of all aspects of WA to support the validity, the reliability and the benefits of our method using real-world web data.