Preservation of Web Resources

Part I

Kevin Ashley, ULCC

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PoWR’s outputs

• A handbook

• These workshops

• Goals:– Helping effective decision making– Helping you implement your decisions

• Today – validating our thinking

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Effective Decision Making

• Decisions that are consistent with policy and regulation

• Decisions that are made quickly and cheaply

• Decisions that are:– Reusable– Long-lived– implementable

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Elements of decisions

• What must/should be kept ?

• What must/should not be kept ?

• Why is it being kept ?

• Who for ?

• Who will do it ?

• What needs to change to make it happen ?

• What are the consequences of change ?

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What might be kept ?

• Information content

• Information appearance

• Information behaviour

• Information relationships

• Change history

• Usage history

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Governmental drivers

• Agency A provides guidance to public on web

• Guidance regularly changes

• CMS tells us when changes are made and by who

• But not why, and not what went before

• Conclusion: keep content

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Thanks to Martin Dodge’s cyber-geography pages

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Implementing decisions

• Guidance on approaches to preservation (and destruction)

• Merits of harvesting tools, capture tools, etc.

• Preservation within CMS context

• Getting other people to do it for you

• Knowing when to do nothing

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Outline handbook structure

• Locating content and responsibility for it

• Locating existing policies and interpretation

• Taking responsibility

• Scoping out preservation activity

• Records management for web managers

• Web management for records managers

• Assessing institutional technical capacity

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Outline handbook structure (2)

• Deciding who wants stuff and why

• Tools to do the job

• Managing preserved content (access etc)

• How much and how often ?

• Implications of change

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What we want from you

• Are these your problems ?

• Are these the answers you need ?

• Is the handbook the appropriate mechanism ?