From today we don’t intend to provide any more significant posts on the JISC PoWR blog and will be closing comments. The blog will remain here as a resource for you to use but it is now officially frozen.

An Archived blog page is now available giving further information on the archiving of the blog. It includes blog statistics for future reference.

The JISC PoWR team would like to say thank you to all our readers. Most of the team members are involved in new digital/Web preservation work so this won’t be the last you hear from us!

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.

The JISC PoWR team is pleased to announce the launch of A Guide to Web Preservation.

This Guide uses similar content to PoWR: The Preservation of Web Resources Handbook but in a way which provides a practical guide to web preservation, particularly for web and records managers. The chapters are set out in a logical sequence and answer the questions which might be raised when web preservation is being seriously considered by an institution. These are:

• What is preservation?
• What are web resources?
• Why do I have to preserve them?
• What is a web preservation programme?
• How do I decide what to preserve?
• How do I capture them?
• Who should be involved?
• What approaches should I take?
• What policies need to be developed?

Each chapter concludes with a set of actions and one chapter lists the tasks which must be carried out, and the timings of these tasks, if an institution is to develop and maintain a web preservation programme. In addition points made in the Guide are illustrated with a number of case studies.

The guide was edited by Susan Farrell who has used her knowledge and expertise in the management of large-scale institutional Web services in writing the document.

The Guide can be downloaded (in PDF format) from the JISC PoWR Web site. The Guide is also hosted on JISCPress service which provides a commenting and annotation capability. It has been published on the Lulu.com print-on-demand service where it can be bought for £2.82 plus postage and packing.

If you want to discuss the Guide on Twitter you should use the #jiscpowr tag.

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.

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.

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).

I’m Jordan Hatcher, and I’m a legal consultant on a variety of issues with a specialism in intellectual property and internet and media law issues. I’ve focussed quite a bit of my work on the area of open licensing, including on data, content, and software. Over this past year, for example, I’ve helped develop a set of open data licences at Open Data Commons, led a study funded by Eduserv on open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector, and done a variety of legal consulting on areas such as data protection, trade mark, copyright and international IP. In all of my work I try to advocate a practical approach to the law, which often means looking at risk management rather than total risk avoidance. As we progress, I’ll be writing more about this approach and some of the legal issues involved in web preservation. If you’d like more info on me and my activities, please check out my site, opencontentlawyer.com.

I am the project director manager for the JISC-PoWR project. My interest in Web site preservation dates back several years and I have given a number of talks on this topics.

A particular area of interest to me is what preservation means in a Web 2.0 environment in which organisations may be making use of third party Web sites. I will be writing posts on this topic, and would very much welcome feedback from institutions who have given thought to best practices in this area.

Ed Pinsent has been doing website archiving and collection management since 2004, funded by the JISC to capture snapshot impressions of JISC project websites which are otherwise in danger of disappearing. The snapshots are currently stored and managed by the UK Web Archiving Consortium. Ed comes from a background of traditional archival curation (understanding of the importance of preservation, context, structured information, user needs); and records management (pro-active maintenance and protection of important assets and resources). Currently a member of the Digital Preservation team at the University of London Computer Centre.

I’m Marieke Guy and I will be working on the The Preservation of Web Resources project (JISC-PoWR). I am a Research Officer at UKOLN, a centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities. More information about me is available from my staff page.

The first meeting of the project team was held at the University of Bath on Thursday 1^st May 2008. The project team is shown in the accompanying photograph.

The team members are, from left to right, Ed Pinsent (ULCC), Jordan Hatcher (consultant), Marieke Guy (UKOLN), Kevin Ashley (ULCC), Richard Davis (ULCC) and Brian Kelly (UKOLN).

Marieke Guy (UKOLN) and Ed Pinsent and Richard Davis (ULCC) will be the main project workers, with Jordan Hatcher providing input into the IPR aspects associated with Web site preservation and myself and Kevin Ashley providing project management and strategic input.

The project team members will shortly be providing their introductions.