A news item on The National Archives Web site has recently announced a new study on “Web Archives: Now and in the Future“. This study, which is funded by the JISC and will take place in collaboration with the UK Web Archiving Consortium, will look into how archived Web sites are collected and made available to users.

The study aims to:

• Investigate how UK Web archives are delivered to users now, and how they might be delivered in the future
• Define the long-term historical and research value of online content in the UK
• Look at different organisations that collect Web archives, and their interests

The study will run until late July 2009, and the results will be published on The National Archives and UK Web Archiving Consortium Web sites in August 2009.

We’ll published details on the availability of the study once it is published.

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), an organisation which is “committed to making digital preservation materials available to the widest possible audience and to breaking down barriers to access”, has released the first in a series of short animations introducing and explaining digital preservation problems and solutions for the general public.  

Not for everyone, I suspect, but I’m pleased to see a diversity of approaches being taken to explaining digital preservation concepts. And making it available on YouTube means that the animation can be easily used in a wide variety of contexts, such as being embedded in this blog post. What do you think? 

A blog post entitled “The Death and Life of Geocities” has been published recently on the Adactio blog by Jeremy Keith, a Web developer living and working in Brighton, England. In the post Jeremy describes how he is “seething with anger” but then goes on to add that “I hope I can tap into that anger to do something productive“. The reason for the anger is his concern that “Yahoo are planning to destroy their Geocities property. All those URLs, all that content, all those memories will be lost …like tears in the rain“.

Although in an update to his post Jeremy does admit that “no data has been destroyed yet; no links have rotted” and that his “toys-from-pram-throwage may yet prove to be completely unfounded” Jeremy is right to raise concerns regarding the recent announcement that “Yahoo [is] to shut down GeoCities“.

Some people, as illustrated by JR Raphael’s article in PC World entitled “So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed” are not losing any sleep over GeoCities demise whilst others, such as the Online Lunchpail blog feel that “the demise of GeoCities … proves my point that the U.S. government never should have approved the takeover of GeoCities by Yahoo!“.

From my perspective I feel that the concerns raised by Jeremy Keith (who, it should be pointed out, is a professional Web developers) will become more widely appreciated as ordinary Web users, who might have used the first generation of public-facing Web-hosting services such as GeoCities for their initial simple Web development activities, realise that their may be sentimental attachments to one’s early work - just as I regret having lost my scrap book from primary school (I remember writing “When I grow up I want to be a Beatle, sing ‘She loves you, yer, yer, yer’ and earn £100 a week“). And what of the social historians - have we lost our cultural memories of the initial take-up of the Web outside of the universities and business sector?

In a blog post by Jason Scott on the ASCII  “weblog of computer history, punditry and trivia” Jason describes the efforts being made to preserve content published on GeoCities. But Jason admits that

“I can’t do this alone. I’m going to be pulling data from these twitching, blood-in-mouth websites for weeks, in the background. I could use help, even if we end up being redundant. More is better. We’re in #archiveteam on EFnet. Stop by. Bring bandwidth and disks. Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.”

What is to be done? Should the digital preservation for the general public’s digital heritage (as opposed to an institutional digital heritage) be left to volunteers? Or will future generations regard us as having failed in our responsibilities as previous generations failed to preserve the built environment and left us with the soulless shopping centres and high-rise building which were developed during the 1960s?

This blog has been occasionally concerned with issues surrounding the capture of Tweets, in their capacity as web-based resources which may or may not have value to the Institution as record or archive material. See Brian Kelly’s post of July 2008. The discussions have been based around (a) is it worth doing? And (b) is it technically possible to capture Tweets, and how? This post is concerned with a third issue, (c), do we have permission to do it, since twitter.com is a third-party hosting service? The same issue in fact, that applies to many Web 2.0 applications which involve members of staff working in the cloud or generally conducting University business outside of the network.

The PANDORA Librarian at the State Library of Queensland has just asked the question about permission. “Do we have a blanket permission for Twitter http://twitter.com/? That is, if we find a Twitter site we want to gather, and we get permission as well from say a politician or whoever has content on that site, can we go ahead and gather?”

The National Library of Australia, who have been involved in a library-centric web archiving programme for many years, replied with the following advice:

“We received advice from Twitter, when asking to archive the Prime Minister’s twitter page, which gives a clear indication that they have no problem with archiving,” said the NLA’s Manager of Web Archiving. “I have also been in contact with another Twitter staffer who also gave permission. So I think it is safe to assume that we may archive selectively from Twitter, depending upon receiving the permission of the Twitteree. However in the case of the PM, we didn’t seek that explicit permission as we have blanket permission, from his Party and the PM’s dept.”

And that advice from Twitter.com confirms this:

“Archiving the Prime Minister’s twitter updates is fine, since he owns the copyright to the messages that he posted. According to our Terms of Service:

Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

This is potentially a useful little development. It may send archivists in the direction of checking the terms of service of other third-party hosting organisations, such as Google Docs or SlideShare, to establish what’s permissible and what isn’t. If copyright and ownership issues are sidestepped or aren’t even mentioned, this could be a cause for concern.

In the meantime, presumably we must also give credit to our Australian colleague for devising the neologism “Twitteree”.