JISC PoWR

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.

This blog is hosted by JISC Involve who provide blogs for the JISC community.

Till recently JISC Involve was running on an old version of WordPress (1.2.5). Earlier this month the JISC Digital Communications Team upgraded their server to the latest version of WordPress (2.9.2) and then migrated all the JISC Involve’s blogs over to the new installation.

Although all blog posts, comments, attachments, user accounts, permissions and customisations were supposed to move over easily JISC Involve users were encouraged to back-up the content of drafts etc. ‘just in case’.

Unfortunately there were some technical problems migrating the content and as a consequence the original theme was lost and URLs now redirect.

Luckily the JISC PoWR team were able to locate the original theme and reinstall it.

However the process has made them aware of the need to record details of the technical components and architecture of the blog. This information can be critical in a migration process and when ‘closing down’ a blog.

The JISC PoWR team will ensure that such information is routinely recorded.

Is there any other information that is important for preservation or migration purposes?

Members of UKOLN who were involved in the JISC PoWR project have recently begun work on a new project creating a straightforward and pragmatic guide to digital preservation for those working on JISC projects. The project will create the  JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation.

It will look at reasons why JISC projects might want to preserve their deliverables, will introduce mainstream terminology and processes and offer clearcut solutions. The guide will also offer lists of references and resources, a checklist of issues users will need to think about and a number of case-studies by which they will be able to benchmark themselves against.

A number of the discussions initiated on the JISC PoWR blog (such as preservation of Web 2.0 services including blogs and wikis) will be taken forward on the new project.

A project blog has recently been launched at blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-bgdp/

Two weeks ago the Library of Congress announced that they will be archiving all public tweets since Twitter began. The tweets have been given to the library as a ‘gift’ from Twitter.

The announcement was fittingly made on Twitter.

Yesterday the Library of Congress blog published a list of FAQs abouut the approach they will be taking.

The FAQ explains:

• Why is it important to preserve the Twitter archive?
  It sees Twitter is part of the historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends – all of which complement the Library’s existing cultural heritage collections.
• What is in the Archive?
  Public information. Not private account information or deleted tweets.
• What does the Library plan to do with the archive?
  Its aims are preserving access to the archive for the long term and making data available to researchers.

Universities grappling with complex decisions on which of their burgeoning digital resources they should preserve – and the inherent financial, technical and legal issues that surround such work – may welcome a report that offers a “supply-and-demand” perspective on how individuals and institutions might manage their digital collections.

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (BRTF-SDPA), a new international initiative funded by JISC and other organisations, has recently released its report entitled Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information. Its report examines the complicated and diverse issues from an economic standpoint. It identifies the problems intrinsic to all preserved digital materials, and proposes domain-specific actions that address the challenges to sustainability. The report focuses its inquiry on materials of long-term public interest in content domains with diverse preservation profiles, namely scholarly discourse, commercially owned cultural content and collectively produced Web content.

JISC is organising a free one-day symposium in London on 6 May 2010 where the Blue Ribbon task force will present its final report and invite responses from the BBC, the Natural History Museum, the British Library, European Bioinformatics Institute and the European Commission. Further information is available.

In a guest blog post Nicole Schulz, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Information Studies at Aberystwyth University reports on a recent survey on Storing Information in the Cloud.

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Storing Information in the Cloud

The Department of Information Studies at Aberystwyth University is currently running a small research project funded by the Society of Archivists examining operational, legal and security issues relating to the storage of information in the cloud for access. This is a topic which is likely to be of interest to those involved in website preservation work, as there has been increased interest in cloud services to support institutional activities. Although the project does not address preservation issues directly, the outputs of the project should be of interest to information professionals involved in digital preservation. We already had interest from various institutions in a follow-up project on preservation issues and are hoping to continue research in that in the near future – so watch this space!

What is the Aim of the Project?

Our aim is to generate debate and to highlight some of the issues surrounding the storage of information in a virtual environment. We have already seen many organisations outsourcing email and data storage to cloud providers such as Google and Amazon for cost and efficiency reasons. Cloud computing can have financial and operational advantages such as reduced deployment cost, increased storage capabilities and scalability. However, cloud computing raises quite a few security and compliance issues that need to be addressed when outsourcing information storage to third parties.

We, therefore, aim to develop a toolkit designed to enable information professionals whose organisations are about to deploy information into the cloud to ask the right questions and identify the right strategies for ensuring that information is kept securely, accessible and in line with relevant legislation. Even though preservation will not feature prominently in the toolkit, it is understood that preservation questions are an integral part of assessing how to manage the information life-cycle in the cloud and need to be addressed right at the start of setting up information management services and procedures.

What did the Survey tell us?

As a first step, we conducted an online survey aimed rather narrowly at information management professionals as the main stakeholders in information security and governance via Listservs and professional bodies’ members lists. Given the limited chosen audience we had a good response rate and gathered interesting insights into what professionals think and do about storing information in the cloud:

• The overwhelming majority of people who completed the survey worked in the public sector.
• Roughly 30% of participants said that their organisations are already using cloud computing and another 40% claim that their organisations are interested in cloud computing but have no active plans as yet.
• Most organisations use or intend to use software-as-a-service and deployment into a private cloud as cloud computing models.
• Data storage, email and standard office applications were named as the main IT services deployed into the cloud.
• There appeared to be no single outstanding driver for cloud computing – reducing cost, scalability and flexibility were the most popular by a small margin.
• Similarly, concerns about storing information in the cloud appeared to be evenly spread with concerns about the retrieval/destruction of data when terminating the cloud service, loss of control over data and data protection at the top of the issues list.
• Preservation and retention management were singled out for areas of further research. And demand in further guidance on operational, security and legal aspects in the form of best practice guidance was identified by the majority of participants

What is Next?

We will run a workshop in Manchester on 21 May 2010 in order to work through some cloud storage scenarios and investigate further issues and approaches to ensuring the secure storage of information in the cloud. Bookings will open soon and you can find more information about the workshops at www.dis.aber.ac.uk/en/news/cloudworkshop.asp.

Following the analysis of the results of both the survey and the workshop, a toolkit and report will be made available by the Society of Archivists in the autumn of this year.

If you have an interesting case study or would like to find out more, please contact me (email: nis@aber.ac.uk).

The Paid:Content:UK blog has recently published an article which informs us that “A Fifth Of BBC Sites Are Already Dead“. The article begins by annocing that “Nearly half of the websites most likely to be closed as part of its big Strategic Review have already long been shut, some for as much as eight years“.

A list of a number of the sites which have been ‘mothballed’ is given in the article. Some of the sites are for programmes that have ceased broadcasting (eg. On The Record) and others are for events which are now over (e.g. Politics ‘97).

I was particularly interested to read about the BBC policies regarding the decommissioning of such Web sites. The article provide a link to the BBC’s policy which describes that inactive pages are left online for reference as “We don’t want to delete pages which users may have bookmarked or linked to in other ways. In general, our policy is only to remove pages where the information provided has become so outdated that it may lead to actual harm or damage.”

With the promises of large cuts for public sector organisations in the offing after the general election I suspect that we will find Web sites in many higher education origanisation being decommissioned.  But will  content be simply deleted, will the content be left ‘as is’ or will a more manged approach to such decommissioning take place? 

I feel there will be a renewed interest in the decommisioning of Web sites.  I hope the JISC PoWR’s Handbook on the Preservation of Web Resources will be of interest to organisations which find themselves  in this position.

My attention has just been drawn to this event by a blog post by Aleks Krotoski. The panel session, which will be streamed live and available for later download, will discuss ways in which the web can be studied at postgraduate level. Many of the examples focus on contemporary issues – the web as it is now – but this looks to be an ideal opportunity to highlight the research potential of web archives, and the services that those archives need to provide to enable research to be carried out. (JISC are commissioning work in this area.) More details are available at ECS Southampton. Worth a visit if you are nearby; I wish we had been able to give more warning!

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.

The British Library has officially launched the UK Web Archive, offering access in perpetuity to thousands of UK websites for generations of researchers.

The site was unveiled earlier this week by the Minister for Culture and Tourism, the Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MBE MP, and Chief Executive of the British Library, Dame Lynne Brindley, this project demonstrates the importance and value of the nation’s digital memory.

Websites included in the UK Web Archive include:

• The Credit Crunch – initiated in July 2008, this collection contains records of high-street victims of the recession – including Woolworths and Zavvi.
• Antony Gormley’s ‘One & Other’ Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Project – involving 2,400 participants and streamed live by Sky Arts over the web to an audience of millions, this site will no longer exist online from March 2010.
• 2010 General Election – work has started to preserve the websites of MPs such as Derek Wyatt, who will be retiring at the next election, creating a permanent record of his time as a Member of Parliament.

This important research resource has been developed in partnership with the National Library of Wales, JISC and the Wellcome Library, as well as technology partners such as IBM.

British Library Chief Executive, Dame Lynne Brindley said:

“Since 2004 the British Library has led the UK Web Archive in its mission to archive a record of the major cultural and social issues being discussed online. Throughout the project the Library has worked directly with copyright holders to capture and preserve over 6,000 carefully selected websites, helping to avoid the creation of a ‘digital black hole’ in the nation’s memory.

“Limited by the existing legal position, at the current rate it will be feasible to collect just 1% of all free UK websites by 2011. We hope the current DCMS consultation will enact the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act and extend theprovision of legal deposit through regulationto cover freely available UK websites, providingregular snapshots ofthe free UK web domainforthebenefit of future research.”

Further details are available from the British Library.

The findings from the Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) survey of digital preservation cost information are now available on the KRDS2 project Web page.

KRDS2

The Keeping Research Data Safe 2 project commenced on 31 March 2009 and will complete in December 2009. The project will identify and analyse sources of long-lived data and develop longitudinal data on associated preservation costs and benefits. It is believed that these outcomes will be critical to developing preservation costing tools and cost benefit analyses for justifying and sustaining major investments in repositories and data curation.

The Survey

The survey was carried out between between September and November 2009 to identify key research data collections with information on preservation costs and related issues. 13 survey responses were received: 11 of these were from UK-based collections, and 2 were from mainland Europe. The responses covered a broad area of research including the arts and humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences and research data archi