When myself (Brian Kelly, UKOLN) and Kevin Ashley (ULCC) initially discussed submitting a joint proposal fore the JISC ITT on Web Site Preservation one of the topics we spoke about was how we perceived our approaches to the work. We discovered that we were in strong agreement on the need for a user-focussed approach to the preservation of Web sites and Web resources, rather than one based on simply promoting a particular ideological stance.

So although we will discuss, say, the benefits of use of open standards in a preservation context, we do acknowledge that simply saying that institutions must use open standards would be an over-simplistic approach. We recognise that the provision of Web-based services is a complex operation requiring many, and sometimes conflicting, goals.

We will seek to advise institutions on how they should address the preservation of Web sites and Web resources in a real-world context of conflicting demands, limited resources, institutional politics and existing services to run.

And we are very keen on hearing from institutions in the sector (and the wider community) on the approaches institutions are taken to managing medium and long-term access to their Web resources.

One of the goals of PoWR is to make current trends in digital preservation meaningful and relevant to information professionals with the day-to-day responsibility for looking after web resources. Anyone coming for the first time to the field of digital preservation can find it a daunting area, with very distinct terminology and concepts. Some of these are drawn from time-honored approaches to managing things like government records or institutional archives, while others have been developed exclusively in the digital domain. It is an emerging and evolving field that can take some time to get your head round: so we thought it was a good idea to offer a series of brief primers.

Starting, naturally, with digital preservation: this is defined as a “series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary” (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2002). Read the rest of this entry »

Hi, I’m Richard, an IT specialist since 1985. I’ve worked at ULCC since 1997 on a variety of web-based digital archives and repository systems. Recent projects include Linnean Online (an Eprints-powered archive of Linnaeus’s specimens), SAS-Space (DSpace IR for the School of Advanced Study) and NDAD (ten year-old dataset archive for the National Archives). Among the JISC repositories/preservation projects that I’ve been involved with are the Significant Properties studies, PRIMO (for the Institute of Musical Research) and SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for Eprints). I’m also studying, part-time, on the MSc E-learning course at Edinburgh University, and I’m particularly interested in how blogs, wikis, social networks, and the like, are being used in education and research (Library 2.0, Classroom 2.0, etc).

I’m Jordan Hatcher, and I’m a legal consultant on a variety of issues with a specialism in intellectual property and internet and media law issues. I’ve focussed quite a bit of my work on the area of open licensing, including on data, content, and software. Over this past year, for example, I’ve helped develop a set of open data licences at Open Data Commons, led a study funded by Eduserv on open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector, and done a variety of legal consulting on areas such as data protection, trade mark, copyright and international IP. In all of my work I try to advocate a practical approach to the law, which often means looking at risk management rather than total risk avoidance. As we progress, I’ll be writing more about this approach and some of the legal issues involved in web preservation. If you’d like more info on me and my activities, please check out my site, opencontentlawyer.com.

I am the project director manager for the JISC-PoWR project. My interest in Web site preservation dates back several years and I have given a number of talks on this topics.

A particular area of interest to me is what preservation means in a Web 2.0 environment in which organisations may be making use of third party Web sites. I will be writing posts on this topic, and would very much welcome feedback from institutions who have given thought to best practices in this area.

If it was we’d all be at it!!

Any records manager or archivist will probably be able to give you half a dozen reasons for why digital preservation is very important. Some might well give you half a dozen more for why the preservation of Web resources in particular, which now play such a huge part in our daily lives, is very very important.

Unfortunately this critical activity isn’t easy. In fact the very nature of the Web means that the preservation and archiving of Web resources is actually a very complex task. A few of the major issues include:

• The transient and dynamic nature of the Web – The Web is growing at a rapid rate. The average Web resource’s lifespan is short and pages are often removed. On the Web publishing is an easy process and content may be changed often and not necessarily in an orderly way. Metadata is very much an afterthought. Web 2.0 content (comprising of data mash ups, blog entries, comments etc.) is even more dynamic.

• Selection issues - Of the billions of resources out there which and which instantiation of them should we preserve?

• The technologies involved - The Web is dependant on technology, it uses various file formats and follows many protocols, most of which evolve quickly. The look and feel of a Web page may be determined by a number of different elements such as the code, the http protocol, the user, the browser and the server. Which of these need to be preserved? Web resources are usually held on just one server, so are at greater risk of removal, yet for some resources countless copies are made. Again which do we preserve? Web sites are held together by hypertext links meaning parts of the site could be omitted (if for example they use a robots.txt file or pages are not actually linked to) if crawled by archiving software. Whole areas of the Web are held in problematical CMS or behind authentication systems and Web 2.0 applications use layered APIs, which use data in many different ways.

• Organisational issues - How is your institution using its Web site? Is it a publication or is it a record? Is the content being managed? Who is responsible and who has ownership?

• The legal issues – There are many IPR and data protection issues with Web content. Who owns the photos on Flickr, the comments on a blog or the details on a social networking site?

There is no easy answer! However despite the difficulties of Web preservation some institutions may be addressing some of these issues already. We are keen to hear examples of any approaches being taken.

I’ve been asked to contribute a post or two on Records Management (RM) and preservation, as it relates to this project. There was certainly a paragraph or two in the original JISC Invitation To Tender that made me think it was possible to apply aspects of Records Management to this task:

“A formal records management approach may be the appropriate response to handling certain kinds of web material and this assumes active management of the material throughout its whole life-cycle, an approach which is intrinsic to all preservation-related approaches.”

We think it’s quite likely this line of thinking may apply to University and HFE websites, if the institutional website is being used as a place to conduct business; or is developing into an area where corporate records are being created and stored. A webmaster or a records manager could start to ask a few questions about the organisation’s website: Read the rest of this entry »

Ed Pinsent has been doing website archiving and collection management since 2004, funded by the JISC to capture snapshot impressions of JISC project websites which are otherwise in danger of disappearing. The snapshots are currently stored and managed by the UK Web Archiving Consortium. Ed comes from a background of traditional archival curation (understanding of the importance of preservation, context, structured information, user needs); and records management (pro-active maintenance and protection of important assets and resources). Currently a member of the Digital Preservation team at the University of London Computer Centre.

I’m Marieke Guy and I will be working on the The Preservation of Web Resources project (JISC-PoWR). I am a Research Officer at UKOLN, a centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities. More information about me is available from my staff page.

The first meeting of the project team was held at the University of Bath on Thursday 1^st May 2008. The project team is shown in the accompanying photograph.

The team members are, from left to right, Ed Pinsent (ULCC), Jordan Hatcher (consultant), Marieke Guy (UKOLN), Kevin Ashley (ULCC), Richard Davis (ULCC) and Brian Kelly (UKOLN).

Marieke Guy (UKOLN) and Ed Pinsent and Richard Davis (ULCC) will be the main project workers, with Jordan Hatcher providing input into the IPR aspects associated with Web site preservation and myself and Kevin Ashley providing project management and strategic input.

The project team members will shortly be providing their introductions.