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.

You can find out more on how to get started on a Web Preservation strategy by attending our upcoming workshop on Embedding Web Preservation Strategies Within Your Institution.

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.

A recent post entitled “Digital Preservation” term considered harmful?” on the Digital Curation blog begins with the words:

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.”

An example of this can be seen for the Research page on the University of Warck Web site. Although not nornmally visibile to most end users who visit this page, there is a link to an RSS feed of recent changes to the page. Using tools such as the Greasemonkey RSS Panel (available for Firefox) you can view the changes, as shown below.

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.