Many good ideas are already coming out of the first PoWR workshop. One thing I personally found illuminating was one of the breakout sessions which I facilitated, called ‘The history of the Institution’s home page’.

The scenario required an institution to provide ‘examples of how the web site has developed since it was launched’. (Brian Kelly has already broached this topic here). My colleagues discussed this conundrum with great vigour, but most had to admit they drew a blank when it came to producing even a basic screenshot from five years ago. Instead, there was a lot of ‘folk memory’ and anecdotal evidence, also sometimes called ‘tacit knowledge’. It was clear that everyone was aware that their web site had changed (and sometimes even improved) quite dramatically in the last 5-10 years. It’s just that no-one could lay their hands on any evidence of the changes. Imagine it like one of those ‘before and after’ reveals which you might get on Changing Rooms on TV. The problem with web sites is that we can’t always lay hands on the ‘before’ picture.

Some drivers for changes included:

• Corporate or institutional rebranding
• Move to a Content Management System
• Content provider change
• External consultancy

And the following sorts of web site elements were subject to change:

• Design, branding, colours, logos
• Accessibility
• Language
• Content - obviously(!) - but do we know what content was added and what was thrown away?
• Navigation - clicks and links became more consistent across the site
• More pages - a site which used to be one ‘main page’ for the entire institution is now much larger and more complex, and every Department in the University now has a suite of pages
• More interactive elements, including automated forms
• Site became more searchable
• More media, video and audio content was embedded
• Distinction between internal and external content became more pronounced

It’s also interesting that one of our colleagues thought that the CMS also added some constraints to working; what once was easy is now much more difficult. I’m sure this is a trade-off we find with most new ways of working and it isn’t meant to imply that a CMS is always evil.

Kevin Ashley heard this summary with some interest and jokingly suggested that perhaps some form of oral history was the relevant preservation solution here. Yet if we have no other evidence of a web site’s history, who knows - it may yet turn out to be the last resort.

In a recent comment on this blog Kevin Ashley makes the point that having an interest in the preservation of Web resources doesn’t mean that one is anti-innovation. As Kevin points out “I see a distinction being made between preserving an experience and preserving the information which the experience makes available. Both are valid preservation approaches and both achieve different ends.

There’s a real difficulty, though, in applying either of these preservation approaches in a environment of rapid technological development. And within higher education we are likely to see examples of such innovation, whether this is scientific researchers involved in new ways of visualisating scientific data or teaching staff who wish to ensure students gain experiences in use of Social Web technologies.

How are such tensions to be addressed? Should, for example, use of immersive environments such as Second Life be banned until preservation techniques have been developed which will ensure that such complex environments can be preserved? Such a draconian approach is alien to the educational sector’s IT development culture (although such approaches are taken in other areas such as biological and medical research). And as I’ve described in a post on “Is Second Life Accessible?” innovative technologies such as Second Life can bring substantuial benefits to the user community - in this case a user with cerebral palsy who feels that Second Life provides a really useful tool for people who are unable to get around, who have problems of mobility in real life “because you can have friends without having to go out and physically find them“.

The tensions between preservation and innovation perhaps reflect similar tensions between accessibility and innovation, with differing opinions being held by the various interested parties. In the case of Second Life (where we are seeing virtual worlds being continually assembled, developed and then redeveloped) there does seem to be an awareness of the need to preserve such virtual worlds, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities having received funding from the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) for a two-year project on Preserving Virtual Worlds. And yet the $590,000 funding for this project, which will not, of course, guarantee that a solution to the problem with be available at the end of the funding, indicates that the preservation of immersive worlds will not be an easy undertaking.

Returning to Kevin’s comment that there is a “distinction [to be] made between preserving an experience and preserving the information which the experience makes available. Both are valid preservation approaches and both achieve different ends. perhaps it is important to focus on these distinctions when we are seeking to preserve our innovative services. Might the video clip of the Second Life experience be the appropriate solution for the pioneers of this technology until the research programmes have devised ways of preserving the much richer and resuable environment? And might not this be an approach which can also be taken for our innovative Web services?