• Suggested best practices and guidelines for general Web site maintenance
• Metadata recommendations
• Sample metadata

Public Records Information Leaflet #26: Managing Public Records on Web Sites.(SC Department of Archives and History: 2002)

Refer to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History's Electronic Records Management Guidelines: Web Content Management for advice on web site records management. The Guideline is located at: http://www.state.sc.us/scdah/erg/ermWCM.pdf  (PDF 90kb) download Acrobat Reader

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Best practices and guidelines for general Web site maintenance 

* Web pages should regularly be reviewed for quality, accuracy, and timeliness.
* Procedures for maintaining and updating data on the site must be established.
* Posting controls so that updates are made only by authorized individuals should be established.
* Procedures for disposition of expired pages should be established and followed.
* The site should be backed up to a secondary medium on a regular basis. This is not equivalent to archival preservation of the site.
* Technical considerations:
* The Web site should be accessible by the most common browsers;
* Standard and open, non-proprietary formats should be used as much as possible;
* Simpler data formats will be easier to preserve;
* Use file naming conventions to better manage pages;
* Maintain an index of the Web site
* Sites containing active information about an agency’s business which may not be stored elsewhere should consider maintaining an historical log of changes to Web pages.
* When a site is determined to contain long term or permanent records, consideration should be given to taking a ‘snapshot’ for offsite storage in order to be able to reconstruct at a given time.

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Metadata

Web page records having a retention ten years or longer should be identified using metadata. Metadata provides background information about the Web record. On a Web page metadata is represented through HTML metatags which are keywords describing the information. The following metatags from the Dublin Core standard are recommended:

1. Title: The name of the Web page

2. Creator: Person or organization with primary responsibility for creating the intellectual content. Name and contact information

3. Subject: Keywords or phrases. It is advisable to use a controlled vocabulary applicable across all Web sites of an agency

4. Description: Short textual description of the content. This may be an abstract in the case of a publication

5. Date: When the Web page was placed on-line. Use a YYYY-MM-DD format

6. Format: The hardware or software necessary to view the page; i.e., Web browser more recent than 3.0, Adobe Acrobat Reader.

7. Resource type: Category, e.g., minutes, press release, report

8. Identifier: Uniform Resource Locator (URL); Internet address

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Sample metatdata: 

<META NAME="DC.title" CONTENT ="South Carolina Department of Archives and History Homepage">
<META NAME="DC.creator" CONTENT = "Nancy Piester piester@scdah.state.sc.us">
<META NAME="DC.subject" CONTENT ="history, archives, preservation, South Carolina, SC"
<META NAME="DC.description" CONTENT = "Welcome to the main page of the SC Archives and History Web site. Links to main sections and news items are contained here.">
<META NAME="DC.date" CONTENT = "1995-10-05">
<META NAME="DC.format" CONTENT= "Netscape 4.0 or higher, Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher">
<META NAME="DC. Resourcetype" CONTENT = "Introduction">
<META NAME="DC.identifier" CONTENT= http://www.state.sc.us/scdah/homepage.htm">