Web preservation is a big topic and we’re not even pretending to deal with all of it. The aspect that we care about - that JISC believes the community is looking for help with - is fairly well-defined. We want to help institutions make effective decisions about preserving web resources, and help them implement those decisions in a way that is cost-effective and non-disruptive.

Making effective decisions
At its simplest level, this means deciding what to keep and what not to keep. There may be many drivers for these decisions - institutional policy, legal requirements and research interests are just a few. The decisions need to relate not just to what is to be kept, but why and who for. That’s because those requirements may have a bearing on how you choose to go about the job, or whose responsibility it is to carry it out. Not everything needs to be kept, and even when it does, it may not be your institution’s responsibility to keep it.

Implementing those decisions
Carrying out your decisions - keeping things, throwing things away, or ensuring that other people keep things - can be the trickiest part of the process. You may know you want to preserve the prospectus for past years, but can you be sure that your CMS, or the Internet Archive, or some local use of web-harvesting tools is going to do this job effectively for you ? You may be being told that some part of your web infrastructure would be easier to preserve if you avoided the use of certain features, or used a different authoring system. Is that true, and if it is, what are the negative consequences of such decisions ?

The handbook which will be one of the project’s outputs will attempt to answer these quesions in a way that makes sense to everyone who might be involved in the process. We want to help to make it easier to take decisions about preservation and to know what tools, systems or working methods can be employed to help you implement them.

The workshops are the primary mechanism we’re using to test whether the handbook makes sense to the people it’s aimed at, and that they tackle the problems that people are actually facing.

The technological and cultural changes brought about by the advancement of the Web have, on numerous occasions, required co-ordinated interdisciplinary work. 0ne of the intended aims of the JISC-PoWR project is to help to bring together the differing perspectives of information professionals such records managers and Web managers in the context of the preservation of Web resource - and there are probably at least four sets of expertise involved: Web content creation (as perceived by Web authors), Web content management from a technical perspective (as perceived by those who choose or configure the underlying software), records and/or information management and digital preservation. So there’s the bringing together of intellectual perspectives: (What content needs to be preserved? How long for? Who is responsible?) and there’s the technical perspectives, assuming that the above questions come up with anything that needs preserving (How do we do it ? Are site-level tools more appropriate than national services? Does CMS X make preservation easier or harder than CMS Y? Is a more accessible site also a more preservable one? Are there configuration choices that affect preservation without (significantly) affecting other aspects of management?)

Within the JISC-PoWR team there have been a number of interesting discussions that have highlighted how differently the different players see Web preservation. To quote Ed Pinsent:

“The fundamental thing here is bringing together two sets of information professionals from differing backgrounds who, in many cases, don’t tend to speak to each other. Many records managers and archivists are, quite simply, afraid of IT and are content to let it remain a mystery. Conversely, it is quite possible to work in an IT career path in any organisation (not just HE/FE) and never be troubled by retention or preservation issues of any sort. “

The cliched view might regard Web managers as concerning themselves primarily with the day to day running of an organisation’s Web site, with preservation as an afterthought, and records managers focussing mainly on the preservation of resources and failing to understand some of the technical challenges presented. And although this may be a superficial description of the complexitities of they ways in which institutions go about the management of the digital resources, perhaps like many cliches, there could be an element of truth in such views.

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