Following the successful completion of the JISC PoWR project we continued to publish occasional posts on this blog related to the preservation of Web sites. We have also recently published a new handbook on the preservation of Web resources which we have announced on this blog.
It is now therefore timely to officially announce that we do not intend to publish any new posts on the blog after a couple of post which provide a summary of how this blog was used. A week or so after the final posts have been published we will switch off comments on the blog – so that we will no longer have to spend time in checking for spam comments.
The blog itself, and all posts and comments, will remain available for the indefinite future – by which we mean that we will seek to provide access for a period of at least 3 years from now.
The summary posts we intend to provide will contain details about the blog such as:
- Number of posts and comments
- Details of contributors
- Details of blog theme and plugins used
- Details of type and version of software used
If you have any suggestions for any other information it would be useful to provide and record please do let us know.
We intend to use the closing of the blog as a case study which will be documented as part of the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation. The Beginner’s Guide will eventually be available online but the process of creating the guide is being documented in the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation blog.
Here’s my overkill checklist for really mothballing something like a blog.
Keep a copy of the software and a mysqldump of the database.
Keep a copy of the site in a structure format, such as XML or Atom.
Capture the site as plain HTML using a recursive wget or similar. This can be useful if the site software gets bitrot (nobody to maintain it) and you want to preserve the articles at their original URLs.
But this is the plan we use for bespoke installs of blogging software, not a blog hosted on a supported blog service.
More usefully, in your case, you might want to include the copyright holder(s) and the license of the entire blog so that it’s archived in the entires, not just the surrounding template. Don’t forget the comments may require a difference license, or remain copyright of the individual contributors. I don’t see any clear instructions right now telling me my comment is submitted under license XYZ. You couldn’t include this comment in a book without my permission!
Also the last post could start with “purpose/theme of blog:”, “intended audience:”, and “active from/to dates”.
Included with the contributors should be hints of how to get hold of them, long term. eg. twitter ids, and other non-institutional comms methods. Unless interested interneters asking you about it years later is the last thing you want, and just want to put the project in the past!
A last but one post could contain the more detailed info and a wrap up comment from the authors. This may include any notable incidents in the life of the blog, such as it being quoted somewhere notable.
Also, any key URLs from major posts or links to other bits of the project that’ll be preserved for sometime.
(This comment Copyright 2010, Christopher Gutteridge and contributed under a cc-by (must attribute) license)
Thanks Chris that is very useful. Might get back to you about a few of your points.
In the handbook we wrote the following:
“Does an institution have permission to archive the content of blogs (and make it available elsewhere)? This might include permission not only from the blog author (which might be obtainable in the general terms and conditions of registering with the Institution), but also third-party content: embedded quotes, images, audio, video. Is it possible to excise potentially offending material, or is the risk (probably negligible) that an Institution might be sued for copyright breaches acceptable? Are institutional staff and students as well informed about the issues of online copyright as they are expected
to be about plagiarism, citation or photocopying regulations? Is it possible to include a default Creative Commons licence in the terms of use of the system?”
Update: Note we have since discovered that the licence for the blog which was initially published in the right hand side bar had disappeared during the upgrade. We have now reinstated the licence information. More information is given in the Archived blog page and in the Making any Upgrades to your Blog Sir? post.
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