Editors’ Summary: The process of preserving websites is complicated and time consuming. One essential step, Quality Assurance, involves assessing how well a website was preserved and the best method for doing this is to manually compare the archived version to the live version. The Library of Congress has over 13,000 URLs archived, making QA very expensive in terms of time and labor. This article describes the experimentation of automating this step of the process. Brenda Reyes Ayala, an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, developed a suite of Python tools that automatically screenshot archived webpages and their counterparts on the live web, then use several algorithms to measure how visually similar the two are. Nicky Martin, the Web Archiving Section’s 2026 Junior Fellow at the LoC, modified these tools for their archive, and reports on the attempt.
Editors’ Choice: What Can a Computer See?: Testing the Limits of Automated QA for Web Archives
