Earlier this week the Digital Curation centre announced the appointment of their new Director who will succeed Chris Rusbridge upon his retirement in April 2010. The role has been taken on by JISC PoWR’s very own Kevin Ashley.

Kevin has been Head of Digital Archives at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) since 1997, during which time his multi-disciplinary group has provided services related to the preservation and reusability of digital resources on behalf of other organisations, as well as conducting research, development and training.

The group has operated the National Digital Archive of Datasets for The National Archives of the UK for over twelve years, delivering customised digital repository services to a range of organisations.

As a member of the JISC’s Infrastructure and Resources Committee, the Advisory Council for ERPANET, plus several advisory boards for data and archives projects and services, Kevin has contributed widely to the research information community.

Kevin has been an active member of the JISC PoWR project and written many blog posts sharing his expertise.

The DCC has just begun its third phase of work makes the following comment on it’s Web site (A new phase, a new perspective, a new Director):

“As a firm and trusted proponent of the DCC we look forward to his energetic leadership in this new phase of our evolution.”

At JISC PoWR we offer Kevin our congratulations and wish him all the best in his new role.

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.

A news item entitled Preserving web resources – new advisory handbook published on the 9^th December 2008 on the JISC Web site Neil Grindley, manager of JISC’s Digital Preservation programme, described how “the JISC PoWR handbook helps institutions to identify where material of interest might exist, which elements may require long-term access and how these decisions can link into wider institutional policies“.

Neil went on to add that “The PoWR handbook recognises that preservation is not an end in itself, but that it can complement an institution’s mission, whether that be improving the quality of research, conforming with national policy or avoiding the threat of legal action. It will evolve following the practical experience of its use to ensure it remains at the forefront of best practice advice for web preservation issues“.

The JISC PoWR project has been formally completed - but the interests of the project team (UKOLN and ULCC) in the area of preservation continues. We have agreed that we will continue to publish posts on this blog which are relevant to the area of the preservation of Web resources for a period of time- we will seek to publish at least 3 posts per month. Around Easter time we will review the status of this blog. As well as posts from members of the JISC PoWR project team we would also welcome guest blog posts from the community. So if you would like to write something about your interests in the area of Web site preservation please contact Marieke Guy (email M.Guy@ukoln.ac.uk).

But for now on behalf of the JISC PoWR team I’d like to wish everyone a happy and enjoyable Christmas.

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.

handbookdraft_10092008.pdf

Attached is an early draft of the PoWR Handbook. This release is timed to coincide with our third and final workshop in Manchester.  We hope to gather feedback from that workshop, and from any comments received via this blog, to feed into the final version of the Handbook.

You can also browse an Issuu.com version of the Report here.

Comments can also be sent direct to Ed Pinsent, if you would prefer not to comment here.

The first JISC-PoWR workshop took place last Friday (27^th June 2008) at Senate House Library and was attended by over 30 people from a wide range of professional groupings, including the Web management and Records Management communities. The day instigated much discussion and started people thinking about how they could make a start on Web resource preservation at their institution.

The main presentations are now available for download.

• Presentation 1: JISC-PoWR Workshop 1, Marieke Guy, UKOLN. Presentation: [Slideshare] - [pres1.ppt PowerPoint file]
• Presentation 2: Preservation of Web Resources Part I, Kevin Ashley, ULCC. Presentation: [Slideshare] - [pres2.ppt PowerPoint file] (audio - pres2.mp3)
• Presentation 3: Challenges for Web Resource Preservation, Marieke Guy, UKOLN Presentation: [Slideshare] - [pres3.ppt] (audio - pres3.mp3)
• Presentation 4: Bath University Case Study, Alison Wildish and Lizzie Richmond, University of Bath. Presentation: [Slideshare] - [pres4.ppt PowerPoint file] [audio - pres4.mp3].
• Presentation 5: Legal issues, Jordan Hatcher, opencontentlawyer. Presentation: [Slideshare] - [pres5.ppt PowerPoint file] (audio - pres5.mp3)
• Presentation 6: Preservation of Web Resources Part II, Ed Pinsent, ULCC. Presentation: [Slideshare] - [ pres6.ppt PowerPoint file] (audio - pres6.mp3)
• Preservation 7: ReStore: A sustainable web resources repository, Arshad Khan, National Centre for Research Methods. Presentation: [Slideshare] - [pres7.ppt Powerpoint file]. Audio: [pres7.mp3]

The presentations are also available from Slideshare. Audio files are available from the Internet Archive.

We are also using a Wetpaint Wiki to collate the feedback from the workshop breakout sessions. If you were there, please have a look and help us ensure that your suggestions are represented.

An ‘at the event’ report written on the workshop by Stephen Emmott has been published in the Ariadne Web Magazine.

Hello. I’m Kevin Ashley, manager of the Digital Archives Department (DAD) at ULCC since its establishment in 1997 (the department, not ULCC.) During that time, DAD has set up and run the NDAD service for The National Archives, preserved digital material for the British Library (before handing it back to them to put in their shiny new Digital Object Management system), collaborated with Cornell and the DPC to produce the Digital Preservation Training Programme in the UK, and many other activities.

I’m currently chair of JISC’s Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group, and ULCC’s representative on the DPC board. My proudest achievement is the creation (with my quondam colleague Martin Powell) of a founder member in the Useless Web Pages Hall of Fame: the ULCC web telephone dialler - often imitated but never, IMHO, bettered. Unfortunately, both the dialler itself and the Hall of Fame are no longer with us on the web, and those links both depend on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. For that reason, and many others, I’m particularly interested in the success of PoWR.

The JISC-PoWR project would like to publish a number of case studies highlighting best practice regarding Web resource preservation.

Has your institution has recently deployed a Web resource preservation strategy or embarked on Web resource preservation work? Would you be willing to share your experiences and discuss solutions to problem areas by submitting a brief case study? If so then please contact Marieke Guy.

Further details are available on the suggested format for case studies.

When myself (Brian Kelly, UKOLN) and Kevin Ashley (ULCC) initially discussed submitting a joint proposal fore the JISC ITT on Web Site Preservation one of the topics we spoke about was how we perceived our approaches to the work. We discovered that we were in strong agreement on the need for a user-focussed approach to the preservation of Web sites and Web resources, rather than one based on simply promoting a particular ideological stance.

So although we will discuss, say, the benefits of use of open standards in a preservation context, we do acknowledge that simply saying that institutions must use open standards would be an over-simplistic approach. We recognise that the provision of Web-based services is a complex operation requiring many, and sometimes conflicting, goals.

We will seek to advise institutions on how they should address the preservation of Web sites and Web resources in a real-world context of conflicting demands, limited resources, institutional politics and existing services to run.

And we are very keen on hearing from institutions in the sector (and the wider community) on the approaches institutions are taken to managing medium and long-term access to their Web resources.

Hi, I’m Richard, an IT specialist since 1985. I’ve worked at ULCC since 1997 on a variety of web-based digital archives and repository systems. Recent projects include Linnean Online (an Eprints-powered archive of Linnaeus’s specimens), SAS-Space (DSpace IR for the School of Advanced Study) and NDAD (ten year-old dataset archive for the National Archives). Among the JISC repositories/preservation projects that I’ve been involved with are the Significant Properties studies, PRIMO (for the Institute of Musical Research) and SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for Eprints). I’m also studying, part-time, on the MSc E-learning course at Edinburgh University, and I’m particularly interested in how blogs, wikis, social networks, and the like, are being used in education and research (Library 2.0, Classroom 2.0, etc).