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End-of-term crawl ongoing. Please help us do QA!

The End of Term 2016 collection is still going strong, and we continue to receive email from interested folks about how they can help. Much of the content for the EOT crawl has already been collected and some of it is publicly accessible already through our partners. Last month we posted about ways to help the collection process. At this point volunteers are encouraged to help check the archive to see if content has been archived (i.e., do quality assurance (QA) for the crawls).

Here’s how you can help us assure that we’ve collected and archived as thoroughly and completely as possible:

Step 1: Check the Wayback Machine

Search the Internet Archive to see if the URL has already been captured. Please note this is not a specific End of Term collection search and does not include ALL content archived by the End of Term partners, but will be helpful in identifying whether something has been preserved already.

You may type in specific URLs or domains or subdomains, or try a simple keyword search (in Beta!).

1a: Help Perform Quality Assurance

If you do find a site or URL you were looking for, please click around to check if it was captured completely. A simple way to do this is to click around the archived page – click on navigation, links on the page, images, etc. We need help identifying parts of the sites that the crawlers might have missed, for instance specific documents or pages you are looking for but perhaps we haven’t archived. Please note that crawlers are not perfect and cannot archive some content. IA has a good FAQ on information about the challenges crawlers face.

If you do discover something is missing, you can still nominate pages or documents for archiving using the link in step 3 below.

Step 2: Check the Nomination Tool

Check the Nomination Tool to see if the URL or site has been nominated already. There are a few ways to do this:

Step 3: Nominate It!

If you don’t see the URL you were looking for in any of those searches, please nominate it here.

There are a few plugins and bookmarklets to help nominate via your browser, eg this one created by Matt Price for an event at University of Toronto, and others available at the bottom of this page.

Questions? Please contact the End of Term project at eot-info AT archive DOT org.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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