The Auricle E-Learning Blog

The e-learning team at the University of Bath was one of the early adopters of blog technologies to provide a forum for reflecting on e-learning in a Web content.   The blog was set up by Derek Morrison when he was head of the e-learning unit. Derek had an interest in exploring the potential of new technologies, with one example of this being the series of podcast interviews he recording and made available on the blog back in 2005.  This included an interview with John Dale about the innovative blogging service developed at the University of Warwick (the first large scale student blogging service in the UK)  and, perhaps not as noteworthy, an interview with me on my reflections of the WWW 2005 conference.

The name of the e-learning team’s blog was Auricle, which has an advantage of being a very Google-friendly name, and a Google search for “Auricle Bath” finds links to the blog itself and various page which refer to the blog. Unfortunately it seems that the blog no longer exists - following a link to the blog’s home page gets a 404 error message:

The web address http://www.bath.ac.uk/dacs/cdntl/pMachine/morriblog.php was not found. It may have moved, or it may no longer be available.

How unfortunate - all that potentially valuable historical content giving views on the potential of the Web (including technologies such as blogs and podcasts) to enhance the quality of the student’s learning experiences now no longer available.  And how should the University of Bath feel about this loss of its intellectual endeavours and the role that the University had in being one of the early adopters of blogs by an e-learning team.

Why Did The Blog Disappear?

The URL for the Auricle blog provides an indication of some of the reasons for the disappearance of the blog: dacs refers to the Division of Access and Continuing Studies and cdntl to the Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning - but neither of these departments still exists.  Following staff departures and organisational changes, support for learning at the University of now provided by the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office (LTEO)  with the e-Learning Team having responsibility for managing and supporting e-learning developments.

In addition to these organisational changes, the pMachine part of the blog’s domain name refers to the pMachine blog engine and morriblog clearly refers to  Derek Morrison, who left the University a number of years ago to support the HE Academy’s Pathfinder programme.

It is perhaps not surprising that following such changes and the influx of a large number of new staff in the e-Learning Team that the Auricle blog got lost somewhere along the way!

Can We Retrieve Any Of The Resources?

Is it possible to retrieve any of the blog posts and related resources? Is it possible to obtain any details about the blog, such as when it was launched, the number of posts published during its lifetime, how popular it was and, perhaps, the impact that the blog may have had?

Since the blog was public, as opposed to a blog which was restricted to members of the University of Bath, the contents of the blog have been indexed by Google. And using a combination of search terms, such as “Auricle Bath”, it is also possible to discover Web resources which cite the Auricle blog. This helped me to find a blog post on Stephen Downes’s blog on The Weblog as the Model for a New Type of Virtual Learning Environment? in which Stephen (a high profile Canadian e-learning guru)  clearly acknowledged the importance of Derek Morrison’s views on the potential of the blog as providing “the basis for a distributed, not centralised, information and learning object system“:

The author of Auricle nails it. “In the weblog, however, the announcements, articles, stories are the raison d’etre’ so much so that, not satisfied to present articles from one source, the weblog has the temerity, due to the adoption of the RSS standard, to receive syndicated stories from other sources and, in turn, offer it’s own portfolio of articles for use by others. For example, a blog supporting a programme or module could be the vehicle by which faculty post date and time-stamped short articles relevant to the course but which also link to related, but distributed, learning resources which are presented via RSS feeds. Such feeds can be static or dynamic so that updated RSS formatted information will be reflected in whatever application is displaying it, e.g. a la Auricle’s RSS Dispenser. Here then is the basis for a distributed, not centralised, information and learning object system.” (My emphasis) Derek Morrison, Auricle, February 27, 2004.

And the date of Stephen’s post (27 February 2004) indicates that the Auricle blog was available in early 2004.

With some further use of Google I discover that the Auricle podcast resources are still available on the University of Bath Web site - and I’m pleased that the MP3 file of my interview has not been lost. The RSS file also contains the publication dates, which show that the podcasts were published during 2005. We seem to have unearthed some further information about the Auricle blog.

Rediscovering The Blog!

It required a Google search for “Auricle Morrison” for me to discover that the Auricle blog is alive and well! It is now hosted at http://www.auricle.org/auriclewp/ (much better than the original URI!).  And as well as providing access to the original posts (although with a new look-and-feel, as the blog is now based on the Wordpress blog software)  the blog is still active, with Derek using the blog to support his Pathfinder work at the HE Academy. As Chris Rusbridge pointed out on a post on “Digital Preservation” term considered harmful?” on the Digital Curation blog “phrases like “long term accessibility” or “usability over time” are better than the process-oriented phrase “digital preservation“. And here’s an example of how the Auricle blog has been preserved by continuing to still be used and accessible to its user community.

The Lessons

What are the implications of this case study for the wider community? And what lessons can be learnt?

We should be aware of the dangers of associating services with departmental names and specific technologies. This has been well documented, including Tim Berners-Lee’s article on “Cool URIs Don’t Change!” - although this is clearly easy to say, but more difficult to implement in practice.

I feel there is also a need for departments to audit their networked services and to document their policies regarding the sustainability of such services.  And such documented policies should be examined when departments change their names or there are significant changes in personnel.

And this case study provides an interesting example of a service which has been driven by an individual - Derek Morrison. As Derek clearly felt ownership to the Auricle blog, he was motivated to migrate the content of the blog to a new platform and, at a later date, to continue to contribute to the blog, although not as frequently as previously.  This probably saves the e-Learning Team at Bath from having to retrieve backup copies of the blog posts and provide an archived copy of the resource.  But who owns the blog?  And what would have happened if there had been an ownership dispute over the blog and the name of the blog?  These are questions which will be relevant to many academics and support who make use of blogs to support their professional activities - including myself and my UK Web Focus blog. But as the contents of my blog have a Creative Commons licence I would hope that there will minimise any legal barriers to the contents of my blog being migrated to a new environment should circumstances change.

The second JISC PoWR workshop was held on 23^rd July 2008 as part of UKOLN’s annual institutional Web management workshop, IWMW 2008.

This workshop provided an opportunity to review the outcomes of the first workshop, in which members of the JISC PoWR team and the 30+ participants identified some of the challenges to be faced in preserving content held on institutional Web services and explored some of the ways in which these challenges can be addressed. The slides for this review are available on Slideshare and are embedded below.

The main focus of the second workshop, however, was to look at the additional challenges which need to be addressed in a Web 2.0 context, when the content may be more dynamic, hosted by third party services and created by a wide range of users.

A PowerPoint presentation was used to initiate discussions based on a number of scenarios including use of blogs, wikis, Twitter, communications tools, social networks, ‘amplified events’ and use of third party repository services such as Slideshare - which is appropriate as this presentation is itself available on Slideshare and is embedded below.

This presentation doesn’t have any answers to these challenges - it was intended to initiate the debate at the workshop. Some of the approaches which may be relevant to the various scenarios have already been discussed on this blog including use of wikis, student blogs, use of Slideshare, instant messaging and Twitter and the wider set of discussions which took place at the workshop will feed into the final JISC PoWR handbook.

It is worth noting that this presentation was spotlighted on the Slideshare home page. This has helped to increase the visibility of the work of the JISC PoWR project: a week after the presentation hed been given there had been 713 views of the slides. It should also be noted that other Slideshare users had assigned various tags to the presentation (including data-portability, digital-preservation, sioc and preservation). As can be seen if you follow these links, we are beginning to see use of such social Web technologuies which can help users to discover related resources of interest to the digital preservation community.  This, to me, is a good example of the potential benefits which Web 2.0 can provide to those with n interest in the presevation of Web resources.

Background

The Web 2.0 environment has a strong emphasis on communications between individuals and not just one-way publishing. This pattern of usage places additional challenges for institutions wishing to ensure that records are kept of the dialogue which takes place. And these challenges may well need to be addressed within the context of policies on the preservation of Web resources as increasingly digital communications technologies will have Web interfaces.

We will be publishing a series of posts looking at different aspects of Web 2.0. In this initial post we will provide a brief case study on use of instant messaging to support communications between two institutions. The case study will attempt to draw out some of the general policy issues which should be applicable more widely.

Use of IM for the QA Focus Project

This example describes the approaches taken to use of instant messaging to support communications between the project partners for the JISC-funded QA Focus project which was launched in January 2002. The project partners were UKOLN (based at the University of Bath) and, initially, ILRT, University of Bristol. However after the end of the first year of the project ILRT withdrew form the project and were replaced by AHDS, who were based in London.

In order to minimise the amount of travel and to help to provide closely integrated working across the project partners it was agreed to make use of instant messaging technologies. As well as enabling the team members to have speedy contact with each other it was also recognised that official project meetings could be held using the technology. It was appreciated that in this context there was a need to have a slightly formal protocol for managing the meetings, to compensate for the limitations of online meetings. And in addition to the best practices for managing the online meetings it was also agreed that a record of the transcript would be kept, and that this record would be copied across to the Intranet along with other formal documents.

After AHDS replaced by ILRT as project partners we decided to change our IM client from Yahoo Messenger to MSN Messenger. It was either during this change of IM tools or whilst making use of another IM client (I can’t recollect the exact details) that we noticed that different IM applications work in slightly different ways. This includes whether a transcript of dialogue is kept automatically and whether new participants to a group chat will see only new discussions or discussions which have taken place previously (which has the potential to cause embarrassments at the least).

The experiences we gained in use of IM led the project partners to develop a policy on use of IM (which covered issues such as the possible dangers of interruptions, as well as keeping records of formal meetings held on IM). The policy also clarified use of IM in an informal context, with their being no guarantee that records would be kept.

The policy stated that:

• IM software may be used for formal scheduled meetings. In such cases standard conventions for running meetings should be used. For example an agenda should be produced, actions clearly defined, changes of topics flagged and a record of the meeting kept.
• IM software may be used for direct communications between individual team members. For example it may be used for working on particular tasks, to clarify issues when working on collaborative tasks and to support team working. IM may be particularly suited for short term tasks for which no archive is needed and other team members need not be involved - for example, arranging a meeting place.
• Highly confidential information will not be sent using IM, due to the lack of strong encryption.

General Issues

The general issues arising from this case study include:

• The need to ensure that the users of the IM technologies and those involved in developing policies related to its use have a good understanding of how the technologies work together with an understanding of the differences between different IM systems.
• The need for simple documented policy statements

Slideshare is a popular externally hosted Web 2.0 service for providing access to presentations. And as I’ve described on the UK Web Focus blog, there is evidence to demonstrate its impact in maximising awareness of presentations - and this might include both awareness of research activities, as described in my post, but also marketing activities.

But what about the risks associated in making use of a third party service in this way? What will happen if, for example, the Slideshare’s business model is flawed and the company goes bankrupt? Rather than making use of a Web 2.0 service shouldn’t we be providing Slideshare’s functionality in-house?

I feel this is the wrong response: it would be similar to saying that we should not allow third party organisations to manage our savings - but we all have bank accounts. And, although we know from recent experiences in the UK that there can be risks when using banks, we don’t shut down our accounts when we became aware if incidents such as Northern Rock financial difficulties. Rather we assess the risks and then manage the risks (in the case of savings, this might be to limit one’s saving to a maximum of £35,000 with any single bank, as this amount is guaranteed by the Government).

In the case of Slideshare an in-house solution would not only be costly to replicate its functionality, but it would also be unlikely to provide the impact and popularity which Slideshare has.

The challenge then is to assess possible risks and to explore mechanisms for managing such risks. The approach I take is to look at the popularity of the service and its user community (an approach, incidentally, which has also been recommended when selecting open source software). The Techcrunch service can be useful if providing information on the financial background to many Web 2.0 companies and its information on Slideshare seems reassuring, with a post in May 2008 described how SlideShare had Secured $3M for Embeddable Presentations.

The risk management approach I have taken is to store a managed master copy of the slides on the UKOLN Web site and ensure that links to this resource are provided on Slideshare.  As can be seen from the image,  the URL is included  on the title slide and in the accompanying metadata. In addition the URL is also included in the footer of the hard copy printouts. I also provide a Creative Commons licence for the resource, which seeks to avoid any legal barriers to future curation of the resource and allow the resource to be downloaded from the Slideshare site.

This approach aims to ensure that the master resource is kept at a stable managed location, allows users to make a copy of the resource (if, for example, the Slideshare service suffers from performance or reliability problems) and allows uses to bookmark or cite the managed master version of the file.

How should an institution go about providing a blogging service for its students? The traditional approach which has been taken to the provision of an IT service for members of an institution has been to evaluate the range of products and select a solution which satisfies the user requirements, taking into account the resource and support implications.

In a Web 2.0 environment, however, other options become available. Rather than installing software locally, services which are available on the network can be used - and blogging services such as Wordpress and Blogger are very popular blog hosting services.

What are the preservation aspects associated with the provision of a student blogging service? One might feel that the locally-installed application must be preferable, since management of the software and data is under the control of the institution. But what happens when students leave the institution? The normal policy in many institutions has been to delete student accounts and their data shortly after they leave. But is this desirable from the student’s perspective?  And what if they wish their data - their blog posts - to still be available after they leave the institution?

This is starting to happen, with the University of Warwick, which provided the first large-scale student blogging service a number of years ago. And as I wrote about a year ago, we are starting to see the first generation of student blog enthusiasts asking these questions. My post linked to a blog post hosted at the University of Warwick from a student (Jo Casey) who asked:

“In the middle of August I will be leaving Warwick (to be the new Corporate Communications Manager at the Open University). … But, given that I will have to migrate my blog, where is the best place to go?“.

Unfortunately Jo’s blog was been deleted after she left the University - I was fortunate to have captured her question on my blog.

In light of this particular example from an institution which pioneered use of students blogs, my question would be “Wouldn’t institutions be advised to recommend the use of mature hosted blogging services for members of the institution - such as students - who will normally only be at the institution for a short period?”

Would this be a desirable approach? What are the disadvantages? And could such problems be addressed?

Records Management has a concept of record declaration. This is the point when we “draw a metaphorical line in the sand and fix the content of a record” (see the JISCInfo Kit on Records Management which also uses the term ‘fixity’ in this context.)

Most electronic records management systems (ERMS) provide users with the ability to perform this declaration automatically. When they do so, the digital content they have created (e-mail, document or whatever) becomes ‘fixed’. UK Government have called this creating ‘locked down and secure’ records, a necessary step for ensuring their authenticity and reliability.

But ERM systems seem to work best with static documents; authors of reports, for example, understand that a good time to declare their report as a record is when the final approved version has been accepted. Yet one of the distinctive features of Web 2.0 content is that the information is very fluid, and often there is no obvious point at which to draw this line and fix content.

One example might be blog posts. These can receive comments from the moment they are posted and well into the future. Not only this but many bloggers go back and edit previous posts and delete comments. This matter was recently discussed on Brian Kelly’s UKWeb Focus blog. Phil Wilson asked:

“Brian, is there any reason you never modify or update your posts when you’ve made an error, and instead make users plough through the comments to see if anything you’ve said is wrong?” (UK Web Focus Blog)

Brian’s response was that he sometimes fixes typos and layout issues but is:

“reluctant to change the meaning of a published post, even (or perhaps especially) if I make mistakes. In part I don’t want to undermine the authority of any comments or the integrity of any threaded discussions.”

Brian is open about this in his blog policy stating that only in exceptional circumstances will postings and comments be deleted.

Concerns about censorship and bloggers deleting posts/comments were also recently made in responses to What is fair play in the blogo/commentosphere? on Nature’s Blog.

Assuming that blog posts are to be included within a records management programme or a preservation programme, the issues described above might cause problems for those attempting to preserve authentic and reliable Web resources.

One approach is to be explicit in your Web Resource Preservation strategy about when you freeze Web resources for preservation, and the implications of doing so.

Another approach might involve an agreed institutional policy such as Brian has, but with an additional form of wording that is explicit about the status of blog posts as records, including when and how they should be declared as records, and whose responsibility it is to do so. Should selected blog posts be declared as records by their owners into the ERMS? Or will they all be harvested by an automated capture programme, and if so, how frequently?

Any thoughts?

Wetpaint wiki is just one of the many enticing, powerful, quick-fix web apps that have sprung up around Web 2.0 and Social Networking. You’ll have your own favourites no doubt: I won’t start listing them here. Wikis have grown up a lot since the first WikiWikiWeb, and now are at the online heart of many educational projects at all levels, from classroom, to research and publishing.

We’ve been using Wetpaint’s wiki feature as a collaborative space for our workshop feedback, and this suits us fine: once we have collated all the input for our project outputs, in a few weeks it’ll probably be no loss to us to delete the wiki, or just set it adrift among all the other jettisoned flotsam in cyberspace.

But what’s often given less serious consideration, in the excitement of using a third-party provider of wikis, blogs, Ning, etc., to get your collaborative hypertext project off the ground so quickly and easily - and without having to go cap or cheque in-hand to whoever guards your web space - is this key preservation issue: what happens when you want to get your painstakingly intricate web of hyperlinked pages out?

There are many good reasons why you might want to do this: you might want to migrate to another wiki system or CMS, as the shape and nature of your content evolves; or put it on a permanent, persistent footing by moving it into your own domain; you might simply want to back it up or take a snapshot; or you might want to pull out information for publication in a different form. When you had one or two pages, it might have seemed trivial; but what if you now have hundreds?

Unfortunately, just as exporting the information is often a secondary consideration for wiki content creators, so it also is for the wiki farm systems. The Wetpaint Wiki discussion boards indicate that an export feature was a long time in coming (and its absence quite a blocker to adoption by a number of serious would-be users). And what was eventually provided leaves a lot to be desired.

Wetpaint’s backup option “lets” you download your wiki content as a set of HTML files. Well, not really HTML files: text files with some embedded HTML-like markup. (Which version? Not declared.) Don’t expect to open these files locally in your browser and carry on surfing your wiki hypertext (even links between wiki pages need fixing). The export doesn’t include comment threads or old versions. Restoring it to your online wiki is not possible. But, for what it’s worth, you have at least salvaged some sort of raw content, that might be transformed into something like the wiki it came from, if hit with a bit of Perl script or similar.

I checked out Wikidot - another impressively-specced, free “wiki farm”. Wikidot’s backup option will deliver you a zip file containing each wiki page as a separate text file, containing your wiki markup as entered, as well as all uploaded file attachments. However, according to Wikidot support:

you can not restore from it automatically, it does not include all page revisions, only current (latest), it does not include forum discussion or page comments.

To reconstruct your wiki locally, you’ll, again, need some scripting, including using the Wikidot code libraries to reconvert its non-standard wiki-markup into standard HTML.

A third approach can be seen with a self-hosted copy of Mediawiki. Here you can select one or more pages by name, and have them exported as an XML file, which also contains revisions and assorted other metadata. Within the XML framework, the page text is stored as original wiki markup, raising the same conversion issues as with Wikidot. However, the XML file can be imported fairly easily into a different or blank instance of Mediawiki, recreating both hypertext and functionality more or less instantly.

In contrast to all these approaches, if you set a spidering engine like HTTrack or Wget to work “remotely harvesting” the site, you would get a working local copy of your wiki looking pretty much as it does on the web. This might be an attractive option if you simply want to preserve a record of what you created, a snapshot of how it looked on a certain date; or just in case a day should come when Wetpaint.com Inc., and the rest, no longer exist.

However, this will only result in something like a preservation copy - not a backup that can be easily restored to the wiki, and further edited - in the event, say, the wiki is hacked/cracked, or otherwise disfigured. For that kind of security, it may be enough to depend on regular backups of the underlying database, files and scripts: but you still ought to reassure yourself exactly what backup regime your host is operating, and whether they can restore them in a timely fashion. (Notwithstanding the versioning features of most wikis, using them to roll back a raft of abusive changes across a whole site is not usually a quick, easy or particularly enjoyable task.)

All this suggests some basic questions that one needs to ask when setting up a wiki for a project:

• How long do we need it for?
• Will it need preserving at intervals, or at a completion date?
• Is it more important to preserve its text content, or its complete look?
• Should we back it up? If so, what should we back up?
• Does the wiki provide backup features? If so, what does it back up (e.g. attachments, discussions, revisions)?
• Once “backed up”, how easily can it be restored?
• Will the links still work in our preservation or backup copy?
• If the backup includes raw wiki markup, do you have the capabilities to re-render this as HTML?

And questions like these are no less relevant when considering your uses of blogs and other social software: I hope we’ll be able to look at them more closely in another post.

How should you go about preserving your Twitter posts, which are sometimes referred to as tweets. You may feel this is a strange question, or perhaps even an incomprehensible one.  For those who may not be familiar with Twitter, this is a microblogging application which can be used to create a brief (up to 140 characters) blog post. Although initially used by individuals to summarise how they are feeling or what they are thinking the ways in which the service is being used has evolved: in some cases it is used as a general chat facility, and so has some parallels with an instant messaging environment (with the added advantage that tweets can be delivered free-of-charge to mobile phones). Of particular relevance to this blog, is the way in which institutions are beginning to explore Twitter’s potential from an institutional context.

On a recent post on the UK Web Focus blog I described how the Open University has set up an institutional Twitter account. And a number of responses to the posts described similar institutional Twitter accounts for Edge Hill University (illustrated), Birmingham City University, Coventry University and Aston University. We can also expect departments to follow the example of the School of Law at the University of Sheffield  which is using Twitter to syndicates its Law School News blog.

Many fans of Twitter may feel that issues of preservation shouldn’t intrude in what is normally used as a individual productivity and social tool. However if is often the case that new technologies which may have initially been provided for individual use and for social purposes, quickly seem to be used by early adopters in teaching and learning and research contexts. And soon afterwards institutions which are willing to explore the potential of such emerging technologies to support the needs of the institution will set up Twitter accounts, areas on YouTube, iTunes, etc. as, for example, the Open University has done.

Hence the need, I would argue, for institutions to ensure that they have considered the preservation and management implications of their tweets, even if the institutions feels that it would be inappropriate to have heavyweight policies on personal use of micro-blogging technologies. But perhaps before we establish the institutional policies we need to think about the different ways in which such micro-blogging applications may be used and also what the potential risks may be. 

Any thoughts? 

I recently posted an article about the history of the University of Bath home page which included a link to a display of versions of the home page, based on data taken from the Internet Archive from 1997-2007.

Andy Powell, a former colleague of mine who used to work at the University of Bath, posted a Twitter message in response to my post in which he said:

@briankelly all pages prior to http://tinyurl.com/47pydq were mine - that’s what web design was like back then! - but all records now lost

03:56 PM June 18, 2008 from twhirl in reply to briankelly

But although formal records of the decisions made related to the home page (its design, the content, the links and the technologies used) may have been lost (or perhaps not even kept) I do wonder whether it may be possible to document such history based on anecdotal evidence from those who were either direectly involved with the decision-making process or perhaps who observed the results of the decisions.

From the museum’s sector and the experiences of The National Archive (with the public Wiki service) we know that the general public does seem willing to provide anecdotal information on resources such as old photographs.

This approach seems to reflect some of the discussions held at the first JISC PoWR workshop. As described in Ed Pinsent’s summary of the event “there was a lot of ‘folk memory’ and anecdotal evidence, also sometimes called ‘tacit knowledge’“.

Would it be possible, I wonder, to provide access to images of an institution’s old Web pages and, though use of social networking technologies, encourage members of the institution (and perhaps the wider community) to document their recollections of the Web site?

In a recent comment on this blog Kevin Ashley makes the point that having an interest in the preservation of Web resources doesn’t mean that one is anti-innovation. As Kevin points out “I see a distinction being made between preserving an experience and preserving the information which the experience makes available. Both are valid preservation approaches and both achieve different ends.

There’s a real difficulty, though, in applying either of these preservation approaches in a environment of rapid technological development. And within higher education we are likely to see examples of such innovation, whether this is scientific researchers involved in new ways of visualisating scientific data or teaching staff who wish to ensure students gain experiences in use of Social Web technologies.

How are such tensions to be addressed? Should, for example, use of immersive environments such as Second Life be banned until preservation techniques have been developed which will ensure that such complex environments can be preserved? Such a draconian approach is alien to the educational sector’s IT development culture (although such approaches are taken in other areas such as biological and medical research). And as I’ve described in a post on “Is Second Life Accessible?” innovative technologies such as Second Life can bring substantuial benefits to the user community - in this case a user with cerebral palsy who feels that Second Life provides a really useful tool for people who are unable to get around, who have problems of mobility in real life “because you can have friends without having to go out and physically find them“.

The tensions between preservation and innovation perhaps reflect similar tensions between accessibility and innovation, with differing opinions being held by the various interested parties. In the case of Second Life (where we are seeing virtual worlds being continually assembled, developed and then redeveloped) there does seem to be an awareness of the need to preserve such virtual worlds, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities having received funding from the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) for a two-year project on Preserving Virtual Worlds. And yet the $590,000 funding for this project, which will not, of course, guarantee that a solution to the problem with be available at the end of the funding, indicates that the preservation of immersive worlds will not be an easy undertaking.

Returning to Kevin’s comment that there is a “distinction [to be] made between preserving an experience and preserving the information which the experience makes available. Both are valid preservation approaches and both achieve different ends. perhaps it is important to focus on these distinctions when we are seeking to preserve our innovative services. Might the video clip of the Second Life experience be the appropriate solution for the pioneers of this technology until the research programmes have devised ways of preserving the much richer and resuable environment? And might not this be an approach which can also be taken for our innovative Web services?