One very large part of digital preservation is the act of crawling and saving pages on the live Web into a format for future generations to view. To accomplish this, web archivists use various crawlers, tools, and bits of software, often built to purpose. Because of these tools' ad hoc functionality, users expect them to function much better than a general purpose tool. As anyone that has looked up a complex web page in The Archive can tell you, the more complex the page, the less likely that all resources will be captured to replay the page. Even when these pages are preserved, the replay experience is frequently inconsistent from the page on the live web. We have started building a preliminary corpus of tests to evaluate a handful of tools and web sites that were created specifically to save web pages from being lost in time. In homage to the web browser evaluation websites by the Web Standards Project , we have created The Archival Acid Test as a first step in ensuring...
