Sowing the Seeds for More Usable Web Archives: A Usability Study of Archive-It

In 2017, seven members of the Archive-It Mid-Atlantic Users Group (AITMA)
conducted a study of 14 subjects representative of their stakeholder
populations to assess the usability of Archive-It, a web archiving
subscription service of the Internet Archive. While Archive-It is the most
widely-used tool for web archiving, little is known about how users
interact with the service. This study intended to teach us what users
expect from web archives, which exist as another form of archival
material. End-user subjects executed four search tasks using the public
Archive-It interface and the Wayback Machine to access archived
information on websites from the facilitators' own harvested
collections and provide feedback about their experiences. The tasks were
designed to have straightforward pass or fail outcomes, and the
facilitators took notes on the subjects' behavior and commentary
during the sessions. Overall, participants reported mildly positive
impressions of Archive-It public user interface based on their session.
The study identified several key areas of improvement for the Archive-It
service pertaining to metadata options, terminology display, indexing of
dates, and the site's search box. Download the README.txt for a
detailed description of this dataset's content.