My review of the Steve Bailey text Managing the Crowd: Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world has now been published in the latest Ariadne magazine.

This text has been mentioned at PoWR workshops, on the PoWR blog and on the JISC Information Environment Team blog. I can honestly say that it has had quite an impact on my thinking with regard to preservation and Web 2.0 resources, other members of the PoWR team may agree.

As I say in the conclusion:

This book offers up much food for thought. Bailey wants to wake up and shake his community. He wants to make them see that all is not well in the records management world and that if they don’t start moving with the times then they will be pushed out of the way. He contends there is a very real possibility that records management as we know it will cease to exist; it will be outsourced.

Go on, have a read.

JISC have announced the publication of a study on Digital Preservation Policies which can be downloaded in PDF format from the JISC Web site.

This study aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for Higher and Further Education Institutions. Although focussing on the UK Higher and Further Education sectors, the study draws widely on policy and implementations from other sectors and countries and will be of interest to those wishing to develop policy and justify investment in digital preservation within a wide range of institutions.

The study concludes “that for institutions digital preservation must be seen as “a means to an end” rather than an end in itself: any digital preservation policy must be framed in terms of the key business drivers and strategies of the institution.”

Two tools have been created in the study:

1) a model/framework for digital preservation policy and implementation clauses based on examination of existing digital preservation policies;

2) a series of mappings of digital preservation to other key institutional strategies in UK universities and colleges including Research, Teaching and Learning, Information, Libraries, and Records Management.

These tools are definitely worth taking a look at if you are embarking on a Web preservation strategy.

Version 1.0 of the PoWR Handbook is published and released today. The Handbook has been one of the main deliverables of the JISC PoWR project, but there is no doubt that this blog itself has constituted a rich and varied source of discussion and information. (As such perhaps the blog itself should be nominated for archiving). Indeed, some of the blog discussions here have been refitted and turned into case studies and scenarios in the Handbook, as they touch on many important issues.

Version 1.0 is not substantially different from Version 0.3, released last month, but we have taken some recent feedback comments into account, added a useful and comprehensive Index to the Handbook, and made corrections arising from the proof-reading stage.

In the spirit of showing our commitment to the management of Web 2.0- type resources, we are also making the Handbook available on issuu and Scribd.