The draft programme for the third JISC-PoWR workshop (Friday 12th September 2008, University of Manchester)is now available:
Presentation. 1. Introduction to JISC-PoWR (Kevin Ashley, ULCC) Presentation. 2. Records Management vs. Web Management (Marieke Guy, UKOLN) Breakout Session: Web Preservation in your organisation Presentation. 3. Web Preservation and Web 2.0 (Brian Kelly, UKOLN) Presentation. 4. Legal issues (Jordan Hatcher, Opencontentlawyer)
LUNCH
Presentation. 5. The JISC-PoWR Workshops - Inputs and Outcomes (Marieke Guy, UKOLN) Presentation. 6. The JISC-PoWR Handbook - Explaining Web Preservation (Kevin Ashley, ULCC) Presentation. 7. The JISC-PoWR Handbook - Identifying Web Issues (Richard Davis)
COFFEE
Breakout Session: The next steps for Web Preservation in your organisation Presentation. 8. The JISC-PoWR Handbook - Recommended Approaches (Ed Pinsent, ULCC) Presentation. 9. Future possibilities Final Thoughts
More information is available on the Workshop 3 page.
Places are still available. You can register using the Online Registration Form (note that this link takes you out of the JISC-PoWR blog to a Google Doc form).
For those who still need to convince their senior management here are five reasons why you should embed Web preservation strategies within your institution:
1. You need to protect your institution
University Web sites contain evidence of institutional activity which is not recorded elsewhere and may be lost if the Web site is not archived or regular snapshots are taken. If you do not record certain information you are in danger of failing to comply with legal acts such as FOI and DPA, you may be breaking contractual and auditing obligations and put your institution at risk. This risk management approach has been taken to countless other digital resources (for example email - Curation of emails), it is only a matter of time before it is a standard approach to Web sites.
2. Starting a Web preservation programme will make you look like a ‘forward thinking’ university
You could be one of the first to start an official ‘Web preservation’ programme which will be great marketing fodder. (Remember the first UK Universities to offer blogs to students (Warwick), launch a YouTube channel and offer downloadable lectures using iTunes (University College London)? How about the first to get sued by a student for changing the course specification and having no record of the previous entry? Universities have already been sued over Web site accessibility, copyright of material on their site and allowing plagarism to take place.) Embedding Web preservation strategies will also help you think about the continuity of resources, dead links etc.
3. It could save you money
Web resources cost money to create and failing to repurpose and reuse them will waste money. Although Web preservation may have an initial cost, once the process has begun the savings can be great. Having a good strategy in place (which also should include selection and deletion where appropriate) will save both money and energy in the long run. Brian Kelly’s recent UK Web Focus Blog post on the environmental issues involved in digital preservation touches on this. As Owen Steven suggests in his comment it may make sense to link digital preservation to commercialism.
4. You have a responsibility to the people who use your resources
Students and staff may make serious choices based on Web site information and you have a responsibility to make sure a record is kept of this information.
5. You have a responsibility to the people who may need to use your resources in the future
Many of resources your institution publishes are unique and deleting them may mean that invaluable scholarly, cultural and scientific resources (heritage records) will be unavailable to future generations.
These reasons should give your senior management food for thought. These drivers and others will be expanded on in the JISC-PoWR handbook.
At both of the JISC-PoWR workshops delegates have been keen for the project team to spell out the reasons why institutions might want to preserve Web resources. These ‘drivers’ then give fuel to their case for the funds needed to archive the institutional Web site.
The idea of ‘heritage records’ is one that is often mentioned. Using Web sites as a ‘cultural snap shot’ has the potential to be a highly useful activity.
In his interesting and functional text Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World Steve Bailey puts forward the point that deciding what will be important in the future is a tricky business. As he explains in the section on appraisal, retention and destruction: “The passage of time inevitably changes the filter through which we view our world and assess its priorities.”
Steve gives the example of the current plethora of Web sites that offer what we might call ‘quack’ remedies for medical problems. These sites may not seem to be of great interest right now but they may be invaluable to future historians who wish to demonstrate the distrust of the medical profession exhibited in 21st century western culture.
James Curral in his recent plenary talk at the recent Institutional Web Management Workshop used the example of blog posts made by soldiers out in Iraq and Afghanistan to demonstrate the irony of modern technology; these highly informative records could easily be lost while the diaries of World War II soldiers remain accessible.
Preservation mistakes have been made aplenty in the past. The destruction of much of the BBC’s flagship programmes in the 1970s has been well documented and in 2001 the BBC launched a a treasure hunt campaign to locate recordings of pre-1980 television or radio programmes. Ironically the Web site is no longer being updated, though it is still hosted on the BBc server.
So who can know what the future will bring? Which Web resources will we wish we had kept? Which student blog writer will go on to be a future prime minister or an infamous criminal? What bit of the terrabytes is the most important?
As Steve Bailey points out there is no crystal ball. It has always has been, and always will be, very difficult to predict what resources may prove to be valuable to future generations.
Although this offers little recompense for those making these choices, it does at least argue the case that we do need to preserve and we need to do so soon.
Bookings are now open for the third JISC-PoWR workshop to be held at the Flexible Learning Space, University of Manchester on Friday 12th September 2008. The workshop entitled Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution is free to attend and open to Web, information and records managers working in HE/FE Institutions and related HE and FE agencies.
For information on how to reserve a place see the workshop 3 page.
Over the past few weeks I have become acutely aware that the term “digital preservation” may be becoming a problem.
Not quite what one might expect from Chris Rusbridge, director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC)! And James Currall, who recently gave a plenary talk on Web site preservation issues at UKOLN’s IWMW 2008 event, appears to have been responsible for such heresy with his view that:
The digital preservation community has become very good at talking to itself and convincing ‘paid-up’ members of the value of preserving digital information, but the language used and the way that the discourse is constructed is unlikely to make much impact on either decision-makers or the creators of the digital information (academics, administrators, etc.).
But I have to say that I think that these views reflect the experiences we have had in the JISC PoWR project. Indeed Alison Wildish was quite open about this in her presentation at the first JISC PoWR workshop.
While we have to use “digital preservation” in appropriate contexts, including technical and other in-house discussions, and digital curation is appropriate in other contexts, terms that reflect the outcomes are more persuasive. The outcome of successful digital preservation is that digital resources remain accessible and usable over the long term.
and concludes by arguing that:
… outcome-related phrases like “long term accessibility” or “usability over time” are better than the process-oriented phrase “digital preservation”.
Amen to that! This reflects my views on the need to take a user-focussed approach to Web site development, with long term accessibility and usability simply mean that we need to think about the users in the future and not just those we have today. And perhaps that’s the approach we have to take in order to ’sell’ preservation to somewhat sceptical Web developers.
Should our slogan be “Web preservation is dead! Long live long term accessibility! Long live usability over time!” I wonder?
Lorcan Dempsey picked up on the work of the JISC PoWR project in a blog post entitled The institutional record and web archiving. Lorcan described the presentation given at the first JISC PoWR workshop by Alison Wildish and Lizzie Richmond in which they described the changes to the University of Bath printed prospectus over the lifetime of the University of Bath. Lorcan drew parallels between this print publication and the digital environment:
“The University would always have kept the print manifestation; what now to do with the web manifestation? One of the interesting changes they note over this time is the ‘rise of the logo’, and tracing changes in how the institution presents itself over time is also interesting.“
In a response to Lorcan’s post Tony Hirst referenced a blog post by Michael Nolan on the Edge Hill Web Services team blog in which Michael pointed out “one [example of interesting use of RSS] that caught my eye was the University of Warwick’s recent changes feed which allows you to subscribe to find out when the homepage changes. Better still, they have this for every page in their CMS.”
In his comment on Lorcan’s blog Tony Hirst went on to suggest that ”A change feed, like on a wiki, could be one way (maybe) of facilitating 1st, 2nd or 3rd party web page archiving?“. I think Tony might be right. And maybe we are seeing the University of Warwick pioneering this approach, as the feed of recent changes seems to be provided by their in-house Sitebuilder 2 software, “the University’s web publishing tool“.
Perhaps when institutions are next procuring a CMS system they should be asking if vendors provide RSS feeds of changes to pages.
This workshop provided an opportunity to review the outcomes of the first workshop, in which members of the JISC PoWR team and the 30+ participants identified some of the challenges to be faced in preserving content held on institutional Web services and explored some of the ways in which these challenges can be addressed. The slides for this review are available on Slideshare and are embedded below.
The main focus of the second workshop, however, was to look at the additional challenges which need to be addressed in a Web 2.0 context, when the content may be more dynamic, hosted by third party services and created by a wide range of users.
A PowerPoint presentation was used to initiate discussions based on a number of scenarios including use of blogs, wikis, Twitter, communications tools, social networks, ‘amplified events’ and use of third party repository services such as Slideshare - which is appropriate as this presentation is itself available on Slideshare and is embedded below.
This presentation doesn’t have any answers to these challenges - it was intended to initiate the debate at the workshop. Some of the approaches which may be relevant to the various scenarios have already been discussed on this blog including use of wikis, student blogs, use of Slideshare, instant messaging and Twitter and the wider set of discussions which took place at the workshop will feed into the final JISC PoWR handbook.
It is worth noting that this presentation was spotlighted on the Slideshare home page. This has helped to increase the visibility of the work of the JISC PoWR project: a week after the presentation hed been given there had been 713 views of the slides. It should also be noted that other Slideshare users had assigned various tags to the presentation (including data-portability, digital-preservation, sioc and preservation). As can be seen if you follow these links, we are beginning to see use of such social Web technologuies which can help users to discover related resources of interest to the digital preservation community. This, to me, is a good example of the potential benefits which Web 2.0 can provide to those with n interest in the presevation of Web resources.
The page provides details of the Web usage statistics in the early years, with screen images shown of major changes to the home page from 1997 (unfortunately no screen images are available for the first three years of the service).
Information is provided on the people and groups responsible for the design, the changes which were made as new technologies became available, significant additional content that was added and details of awards which the site won.
This is an approach which I feel all institutions should consider taking. And let’s start recording the history of those early years quickly, before the first generation of institutional Web managers start to retire, leave or forget the details of the institution’s Web history.
The Web 2.0 environment has a strong emphasis on communications between individuals and not just one-way publishing. This pattern of usage places additional challenges for institutions wishing to ensure that records are kept of the dialogue which takes place. And these challenges may well need to be addressed within the context of policies on the preservation of Web resources as increasingly digital communications technologies will have Web interfaces.
We will be publishing a series of posts looking at different aspects of Web 2.0. In this initial post we will provide a brief case study on use of instant messaging to support communications between two institutions. The case study will attempt to draw out some of the general policy issues which should be applicable more widely.
Use of IM for the QA Focus Project
This example describes the approaches taken to use of instant messaging to support communications between the project partners for the JISC-funded QA Focus project which was launched in January 2002. The project partners were UKOLN (based at the University of Bath) and, initially, ILRT, University of Bristol. However after the end of the first year of the project ILRT withdrew form the project and were replaced by AHDS, who were based in London.
In order to minimise the amount of travel and to help to provide closely integrated working across the project partners it was agreed to make use of instant messaging technologies. As well as enabling the team members to have speedy contact with each other it was also recognised that official project meetings could be held using the technology. It was appreciated that in this context there was a need to have a slightly formal protocol for managing the meetings, to compensate for the limitations of online meetings. And in addition to the best practices for managing the online meetings it was also agreed that a record of the transcript would be kept, and that this record would be copied across to the Intranet along with other formal documents.
After AHDS replaced by ILRT as project partners we decided to change our IM client from Yahoo Messenger to MSN Messenger. It was either during this change of IM tools or whilst making use of another IM client (I can’t recollect the exact details) that we noticed that different IM applications work in slightly different ways. This includes whether a transcript of dialogue is kept automatically and whether new participants to a group chat will see only new discussions or discussions which have taken place previously (which has the potential to cause embarrassments at the least).
The experiences we gained in use of IM led the project partners to develop a policy on use of IM (which covered issues such as the possible dangers of interruptions, as well as keeping records of formal meetings held on IM). The policy also clarified use of IM in an informal context, with their being no guarantee that records would be kept.
IM software may be used for formal scheduled meetings. In such cases standard conventions for running meetings should be used. For example an agenda should be produced, actions clearly defined, changes of topics flagged and a record of the meeting kept.
IM software may be used for direct communications between individual team members. For example it may be used for working on particular tasks, to clarify issues when working on collaborative tasks and to support team working. IM may be particularly suited for short term tasks for which no archive is needed and other team members need not be involved - for example, arranging a meeting place.
Highly confidential information will not be sent using IM, due to the lack of strong encryption.
General Issues
The general issues arising from this case study include:
The need to ensure that the users of the IM technologies and those involved in developing policies related to its use have a good understanding of how the technologies work together with an understanding of the differences between different IM systems.
Slideshare is a popular externally hosted Web 2.0 service for providing access to presentations. And as I’ve described on the UK Web Focus blog, there is evidence to demonstrate its impact in maximising awareness of presentations - and this might include both awareness of research activities, as described in my post, but also marketing activities.
But what about the risks associated in making use of a third party service in this way? What will happen if, for example, the Slideshare’s business model is flawed and the company goes bankrupt? Rather than making use of a Web 2.0 service shouldn’t we be providing Slideshare’s functionality in-house?
I feel this is the wrong response: it would be similar to saying that we should not allow third party organisations to manage our savings - but we all have bank accounts. And, although we know from recent experiences in the UK that there can be risks when using banks, we don’t shut down our accounts when we became aware if incidents such as Northern Rock financial difficulties. Rather we assess the risks and then manage the risks (in the case of savings, this might be to limit one’s saving to a maximum of £35,000 with any single bank, as this amount is guaranteed by the Government).
In the case of Slideshare an in-house solution would not only be costly to replicate its functionality, but it would also be unlikely to provide the impact and popularity which Slideshare has.
The challenge then is to assess possible risks and to explore mechanisms for managing such risks. The approach I take is to look at the popularity of the service and its user community (an approach, incidentally, which has also been recommended when selecting open source software). The Techcrunch service can be useful if providing information on the financial background to many Web 2.0 companies and its information on Slideshare seems reassuring, with a post in May 2008 described how SlideShare had Secured $3M for Embeddable Presentations.
The risk management approach I have taken is to store a managed master copy of the slides on the UKOLN Web site and ensure that links to this resource are provided on Slideshare. As can be seen from the image, the URL is included on the title slide and in the accompanying metadata. In addition the URL is also included in the footer of the hard copy printouts. I also provide a Creative Commons licence for the resource, which seeks to avoid any legal barriers to future curation of the resource and allow the resource to be downloaded from the Slideshare site.
This approach aims to ensure that the master resource is kept at a stable managed location, allows users to make a copy of the resource (if, for example, the Slideshare service suffers from performance or reliability problems) and allows uses to bookmark or cite the managed master version of the file.
