DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national digital preservation initiatives across the European Research Area. As part of their work they publish concise overviews of key digital preservation and curation issues. Earlier this month they published a briefing paper on Considerations for the Preservation of Blogs (PDF).

The preamble sets the context for the paper:

Blogs, it seems, are everywhere these days, but what about the next day (and the next and the next …). Opinions vary on whether or not blogs merit preservation beyond the actions of a blog’s respective authors. This briefing paper does not contribute to that dialogue. Rather, it provides an overview of issues to be considered by organizations planning blog preservation programs. Blogs are the product of a network of players, including blog authors, service providers, and readers. Discussed here are some key attributes of blogs, and the characteristics and behaviors of these players, which may impact preservation activities.

During the JISC PoWR project we recognised that despite blogs initially being commonly characterised as ephemeral (as commented on in the DPE paper) their increasing importance and role in both the research context and in our cultural history is becoming apparent, and like other Web resources their preservation is a matter that needs to be addressed, somehow.

The PoWR blog has a number of interesting posts on the preservation of blogs including:

• Legal scholarship recognises long-term value of blogs
• Student Blogs
• Auricle: The Case Of The Disappearing E-learning Blog

There is a also a section on preservation of blogs in the JISC PoWR handbook.

We’ve written about Twitter on the JISC PoWR site before mainly when considering preservation of Web 2.0 material. Now Twitter could become a useful tool in helping you communicate about Web resource preservation.

The Archivists and Records Managers Twitter Group is up and running. You can register at http://twittgroups.com/group/archives.

I’m sure there will be lots of interesting posts.

The preservation of Twitter posts (tweets) has again been discussed in the blogosphere. Maureen Pennock commented in her post entitled ‘Making retrospective sense of cross media communications: a new archival challenge‘ that the increasing number of communication mechanisms presents a big problem for archivists.

She points out that “Some of our conversations are cross-media; they may start on Twitter, but they move to Facebook and then the blog. Capturing only one of those accounts means that only part of our conversation is captured. Okay, so you’re probably not interested in capturing our interactions in your archives. But you probably are interested in capturing interactions from important people (back to Stephen Fry and Obama again) and you will thus face the same issues.”

She then says “We all know the problems we’ve got in capturing and archiving emails. What of Twitter? How do you get Tweets out of the system and integrate them into a collection? What of Facebook data? And YouTube?”

It seems the Twitter challenge is becoming more real as it becomes increasingly mainstream.

The JISC-funded TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) is no more. This service, which is based at ILRT, University of Bristol has been reborn as JISC Digital Media, with an expanded remit for supporting digital media in general and not just images, which was the focus of the TASI service. Further information is available on the JISC Web site.

This change has been accompanied by a new domain name - http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/ rather than http://www.tasi.ac.uk/.

Now the TASI service provided many useful resources on best practices for digitisation.  But what has happened to links to these resources? Will we get a 404 error message? Or, even worse, will we get a message saying the domain no longer exists?

The QA Focus briefing document on “Improving The Quality Of Digitised Images” contains a reference to a Digital Imaging Basics resource which was available at the URL <http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/using/basics.html>. Following the link takes you to the resource, which is now available at <http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/advice/using/basics.html>.

There seems to have been a simple mapping of resources from the TASI domain to the new JISC Digital Media domain. And as the original resource has ‘cool URIs’ (i.e. they had no dependencies on a specific technology (such as a CMS, Java server pages, etc.) it was technically not a difficult task to migrate the links to the new domain.

Well done TASI / JISC Digital Media. The challenge now is to see how long such redirects will continue to function.

Kevin Kelly has coined the term ‘movage’ in a blog post published on 11 December 2008. Kevin argues that:

The only way to archive digital information is to keep it moving. I call this movage instead of storage. Proper movage means transferring the material to current platforms on a regular basis — that is, before the old platform completely dies, and it becomes hard to do.

The reasons for this are the continual changes in the formats and degradation of the storage media. I think this relates to the ideas discussed previously on this blog about an emphasis on ongoing access to Web resources rather than the preservation of such resources. In the case of Web resources the need tends to arise from changes in the technologies used to deliver the Web services rather than the formats themselves.

But whether a new term needs to be created is questionable - after all, Kevin Kelly is simply describing the well-established concept of migration of formats. As described in a glossary entry on the DCC Web site:

Migration: A means of overcoming technical obsolescence by transferring digital resources from one hardware/software generation to the next. The purpose of migration is to preserve the intellectual content of digital objects and to retain the ability for clients to retrieve, display, and otherwise use them in the face of constantly changing technology.

Despite this reservation I still think it’s good to see a slightly different variant on the ideas which have been discussed on this blog reaching a new community.