A Guide for Archiving Web Pages
Navigation
Pages in This Section
- What is web archiving- How is web archiving done?
- - Web page best practices
- - Assuring accessibility
- - Using style sheets
- - Using meta tags
- - - Dublin Core metadata
- - Using a CMS
- - Assuring content integrity
- - Using a snapshot tool
- - Using web archiving tools
- - Server maintenance
- - Backing up
- Documentation
Meta tags for description of page contents
Meta tags are XHTML (or HTML) code that convey metadata, or are data about data. They are descriptive, administrative, or structural elements, usually given in the non-displaying header of a web page. Descriptive tags describe the intellectual content of a page. Administrative tags convey information necessary to allow a repository to manage the page or set of pages. They include information on the source of the page (e.g., as a scanned document or email message), copyright, privacy-protection, and licensing information, and information necessary for preservation. Structural tags show the relationship among pages and sets of pages.
Meta tags give access points as targets for search and retrieval, they assure the authenticity and degree of completeness of pages, and they show the context pages pages and display relationships among them.
Meta tags are most useful when they follow widely accepted guidelines for structure and content. In archival use, sets of meta tags are akin to catalog records. An archival metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined tags (or elements) representing specific attributes of a page, and each element can have one or more values. As with catalog record, it is desirable that authoritative sources -- or lists of authoritative terms -- be used for some of these elements, for example the subject matter of the page for its form and genre. The best practice is thus to select terms from controlled vocabularies, thesauri, and subject heading lists for completion of the subject elements, rather than just using uncontrolled keywords. The authority lists that are used for cataloging may also used for meta tags. For sources, see Library of Congress Authorities and the Links to sources of Form and Genre Terms.
The minimum set of preservation metadata include the title of the page, its creator and other source data, the topics covered in the page, the date of the page, a unique identifier, the dominant language of the page, information on intellectual property rights, and a description of the contents. The most widely recommended standard for preservation metadata is the Dublin Core Metadata schema.
-- more on Dublin Core --
Some resources on meta tags
- META Element and HTML, by SKDesigns (2007). "Metadata can help with site searches, indexing, organizing your content, and much more."
- Understanding Metadata (pdf) from the National Information Standards Organization.
- Metadata, a list of resources, tutorials, registries and the like from UKOLN.
- Task Force on Metadata Summary Report from the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access (1999).
- Metadata from UKOLN (2008). Lists UKOLN Publications and Presentations, Projects, Resources from other sites, Tutorials, Initiatives, and Registries or schemas.
- How To Use Meta Tags, an introduction to meta tagging from Search Engine Watch.
- Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions (pdf) by Richard Gartner for JISC - 2008. "The need for a degree of standardization of metadata practices has become more acute, in order to ensure digital libraries the degree of interoperability long established in traditional libraries. The complex metadata requirements of digital objects, which include descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, have so far mitigated against the emergence of a single standard. However, a set of already existing standards, all based on XML architectures, can be combined to produce a coherent, integrated metadata strategy."
- A Dictionary of META Tags from Vancouver Webpages. Gives authoritative information and links to resources.
- Australian Government Email Metadata Standard (pdf) from the National Archives of Australia, 2005. "This document presents a standard set of metadata for use with electronic mail (email)."
