"The IWMW event provides an opportunity for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services to hear about institutional case studies, national initiatives and emerging technologies and to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions."

Parallel Session: Practical blog Preservation

Title:

A3: "Practical blog Preservation

Facilitator:

Richard Davis, ULCC

Abstract:

Blogging is everywhere. Over the last decade the Weblog or online journal has become arguably the single most powerful paradigm of web communication - from Barack Obama's blog to Stephen Fry's tweets. In academic institutions, we may find blogs serving up the musings of academics and support staff, information feeds for departments and courses, gobbetts of student life for prospective students. Whether you just consider it a useful way to communicate, or an essential tool of connectivist and constructivist education, blogging (and the social networking that generally goes with it) is part of the fabric of 21st Century university life.

So, does this stuff have any lasting value? Should we be doing anything to ensure that these streams of information, creativity and interaction survive the next CMS upgrade, annual student account purge, server crash or Credit Crunch?

If so, what? Even within an institute, or at a personal level, preserving blogs can seem an incredibly difficult and complex task if you think about it long enough ( see, for example, the recent briefing paper by Digital Preservation Europe); and while you are thinking about it, valuable information may be being lost.

In this workshop I'll discuss some of the issues around blog preservation, many identified during the course of the JISC-PoWR project, and others which I hope you will bring to the table. We will compare and evaluate currently available solutions (e.g. the Internet Archive, BlogBackupOnline) and consider what actions, if any, you can take yourselves to protect and preserve valuable institutional or personal information held in blogs (and maybe even tweets) and give it the best chance of being accessible to future generations.

Contact Details:

Richard Davis
ULCC

Email: r.davis@ulcc.ac.uk

Materials

This presentation is available on the Slideshare repository and embedded below.