Fáilte go Sráid na Banrighinn

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris

Football and digital preservation seem an unlikely combination but on May 15th Ed and I arrived to a slightly damp Glasgow celebrating en masse the end of the football season, to deliver our DPTP north of the border.  There, I am afraid the comparison between football and digital curation ends but it is worth noting that on Monday our students did not consist, in the main of bleary eyed Scots.  As I am myself half Scottish I was looking forward to hearing about the digital state of play in my mother’s country but curiously we had a very international group, many had travelled far from places such as the European Central Bank,  European Commission, PRONI,  and near  such as from the National Records Scotland (who clearly cannot get enough of a good thing as we were with them 4 weeks previous).  The group was very creative who seemed to work well together. I know  I know, we say this a lot but this group seemed to shine for many reasons.  They were keen to work together and shout out about their ideas right from the start. And though being a disparate international group they managed to work together very neatly and develop some great case studies for us.

Internationally (and sometimes nationally!) language has always been a barrier  for communication, but  it is also an enabler  and this is again where we see something such as the OAIS being a useful way of empowering people to be able to communicate with each other, and other professionals.  The DPTP rarely (and rightly so) has students just from the traditional information management world (libraries/archives/etc).  Many people now being redeployed from different parts of their organisation and as such are often unfamilair with the idea/concept of an archive or indeed of the traditional notion of the lifecycle of a document/record. This is where OAIS is very valuable due to the way it which it expresses the way a digital object should be ideally kept and uses a language describe this.

In many of our case studies with OAIS, we often find that many organisations are actually mapping very well to the OAIS which indicates that it reflects  good and real practise when it comes to managing our digital repository. Our job in the DPTP is to take someone who has never heard of the OAIS (suprisingly more often than not) and by the end of the three days have them fluent in the OAIS concepts both through listening and through application to their own environments.  Our feedback from the course has proven that this is a job well done….DPTP abú!

I’ve been an admirer of WordPress for a while now. I think we first looked at it circa 2004, for an internal news management system, when we needed an alternative to falling foul of Movable Type’s new licensing arrangements. (I think MT’s now reverted to free licensing, but their paid-for interim probably did WordPress a huge favour.)

Since then, I’ve used it successfully for DA Blog and several personal projects – not just for blogging, but also as a lightweight CMS. We’ve also seen the rise of WordPress.com, Edublogs, and, closer to home, JISC Involve. It’s favoured by many web illuminati, such as Brian Kelly and Jill Walker. WordPress is definitely on a roll.

As for Number 10, it certainly looks fresher than of old. Earlier news entries have all been imported – not always flawlessly. The earliest entry I can find is from 17th Feb 2000 (about 3 years before the first widely available version of WordPress) – and it’s not “Hello World”. I imagine there is somewhere behind it all a bigger news machine than the usual WordPress Admin interface – but, of course things like that are easy enough to integrate.

With JISC-PoWR in mind, and discussions about web archiving and continuity, it’s interesting to note that, as a result of the switchover, some versions of the Number 10 website in the Internet Archive are now well and truly broken, stylewise at least. Versions collected in The National Archives’ UK Web Archive seem to have fared better. Some of these seem to be based on Internet Archive material, others are part of the European Archive collection: not having looked for a while, I have to say it’s not quite clear where TNA’s UK Government Web Archive ends and the European Archive content begins. Also, a tad confusingly the “Prime Minister’s Office” website seems to be archived as both pm.gov.uk and number10.gov.uk. (The former now resolves to the latter, which may be a small step for Web Continuity.)

It will be interesting to see if the WordPress switch improves the quality of the website in its ongoing archived form, and general preservability (at least, once they sort out a raft of validation errors). Although it’s not without pitfalls for the unwary, I recently found it fairly easy to create an offline snapshot of a WordPress site (complete with valid HTML and CSS too).

I wonder whether The White House or The Kremlin will be next to embrace the WordPress way?

At ULCC we’re interested to see if we can align some ‘continuity’ ideas within the context of our PoWR project. Many of the issues facing departmental web and information managers are likely to have analogues in HE and FE institutions, and Web Continuity offers concepts and ways of working that may be worth considering and may be adaptable to a web-archiving programme in a University.

A main area of focus for Web Continuity is integrity of websites – links, navigation, consistency of presentation. The working group on this, set up by Jack Straw, found a lot of mixed practices in e-publication (some use attached PDFs, others HTML pages); and numerous different content management systems in use. No centralised or consistent publication method, in other words.

To achieve persistency of links, Web Continuity are making use of digital object identifiers (DOIs) which can marry a live URL to a persistent identifier. Further, they use a redirection component which is derived from open-source software. It can be installed on common web server applications, eg Apache and Microsoft IIS. This component will “deliver the information requested by the user whether it is on the live website, or retrieved from the web archive and presented appropriately”. Of course, this redirection component only works if the domains are still being maintained, but it will do much to ensure that links persist over time.

They are building a centralised registry database, which is growing into an authority record of Government websites, including other useful contextual and technical detail (which can be updated by Departmental webmasters). It is a means of auditing the website crawls that are undertaken. Such a registry approach would be well worth considering on a smaller scale for a University.

Their sitemap implementation plan involves the rollout of XML sitemaps across government. XML sitemaps can help archiving, because they help to expose hidden content that is not linked to by navigation, or dynamic pages created by a CMS or database. This methodology may be something for HFE webmasters to consider, as it would assist with remote harvesting by an agreed third party.

The intended presentation method will make it much clearer to users that they are accessing an archived page instead of a live one. Indeed, user experience has been a large driver for this project. I suppose that UK Government want to ensure that the public can trust the information they find and that the frustrating experience of meeting dead-ends in the form of dead links is minimised. Further, it does something to address any potential liability issues arising from members of public accessing – and possibly acting upon – outdated information.

• Government departments are increasingly citing URLs in answer to Parliamentary Questions
• 60% of links in Hansard to UK government websites for the period 1997 to 2006 are now broken
• Departments vary considerably: for one, every link works; for another every link is broken. (TNA’s own website is not immune!)

• All links work in perpetuity
• No cited information is lost through deletion
• Information is preserved long-term, even if the Web is no longer the dominant publishing medium it is today

• Guidance on creation and use of XML Sitemaps
• A website component (for MS IIS and Apache) that will redirect users to the Web archive if a link is no longer active but is in the archive
• Guidance to government webmasters on best practice for website design and maintenance for archiving purposes