Overview
ISO/TR 14873:2013 - Information and documentation - Statistics and quality issues for web archiving - is a Technical Report that defines terms, statistics and quality criteria specifically for web archiving. Developed for a broad range of heritage organizations (libraries, archives, museums, research centres and heritage foundations), it provides a common vocabulary and a framework to measure, monitor and evaluate web-archiving activities. The report focuses on web archiving principles and methods (collecting, access, description and preservation) and is intended for practitioners, managers, funders and external stakeholders.
Key topics and technical focus
- Terminology and definitions: Standardized concepts such as capture, crawl, crawler, collection, access tool and administrative metadata to ensure consistent reporting and communication.
- Collecting methods: Distinguishes bulk harvesting (domain-scale crawls) and selective harvesting (targeted, higher-quality captures) and addresses crawl settings, budgets and crawler behaviour.
- Access and description: Guidance on access tools, descriptive metadata and representation of archived web resources for discovery and replay.
- Preservation: Considerations for long-term storage, administrative and technical metadata needed for proper management of digital objects.
- Statistics and indicators: Framework for measuring collection development, collection characterization, usage, preservation status and cost measurement - enabling comparable performance statistics across institutions.
- Quality indicators and limitations: Suggested quality criteria, sampling approaches for large-scale archives and acknowledgement of software- and method-driven variance in statistics.
- Legal and organisational context: Notes legal bases (e.g., legal deposit) and roles of multi-disciplinary teams (curators, engineers, managers).
Practical applications and intended users
- Designed for web archiving professionals (curators, archivists, engineers) to help:
- Define consistent metrics and quality indicators for web archives.
- Improve collection development decisions and preservation strategies.
- Report performance and justify funding through transparent statistics.
- Useful to funders and external stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of web-archiving programs.
- Applicable to national libraries and institutions implementing web preservation, crawler management, access tools and metadata workflows.
- Note: ISO/TR 14873:2013 excludes management of publisher-based electronic resources (e‑journals, e‑books) and other non-Web collection methods.
Related standards
- Content of ISO/TR 14873:2013 is intended to inform future entries in ISO 2789 and ISO 11620 (library statistics and performance indicators).
- Produced by ISO/TC 46/SC 8 (Quality - Statistics and performance evaluation).
Keywords: ISO/TR 14873:2013, web archiving, web archive statistics, quality indicators, collection development, web preservation, crawl, crawler, capture, access tool.
