http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/projects-and-work/digital-preservation-faqs.htm

‘It’s designed to demystify issues and give a lead in to more detailed information provided by us or others in the DP community. So ….. please take a look and let us know what you think.’

The DPTP gets a nice recommendation here under ‘Where can I learn more?’. Many thanks!

The first article is a lighthearted attempt to find out whether the NDAD archive contains any information about my own hobby, the sport of fencing and investigates the nature of fencing related injuries recorded in the Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance System dataset. In the second article Ed Pinsent investigates the research potential of the Record of Scheduled Monuments (RSM), his article includes an extremely helpful step-by-step approach to assisting users in searching/extracting the best from this dataset. Finally, Joanne Anthony presents a report on a Linnean Society seminar entitled “The Longer, The Better” which highlighted the crucial value of long-term datasets for ecological science and was held as part of the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Robert Marsham, FRS (father of British phenology).

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?

Why haven’t UKWAC got a copy of this site? True, complex sites like this one tend to remain out of the reach of harvesting tools like PANDAS, which is based on HTTrack, and can’t get good results for sites which rely on complex server-side architecture. The site however is still unarchived as far as we know. ULCC’s Joanne Anthony (who had worked as the archivist for the Bernie Grant Trust) was keen to learn if there was any way of submitting the site for consideration to one of the UKWAC partners. There is indeed an online submissions form available, but this merely delivers a message to the UKWAC webmaster, who then forwards the request to the most appropriate partner. It would help considerably if the individual collection policies of each partner were made more manifest and published on the public site. But the visitor to www.webarchive.org.uk will find only a sketchy description of these policies, for example “The British Library will focus on sites of cultural, historical and political importance.”

Among UKWAC partners, the BL and the TNA are known to be directing their energies on certain specialised collection strands. These are given more descriptive paras at http://info.webarchive.org.uk/col.html, yet the underlying pattern or theme of these collections is not apparently obvious. At least three of them – the Tsunami, General Election and London Terrorist attack strands – appear to be based primarily on the fact that the sites are ephemeral and most in danger of loss (regardless of their informational or evidentiary value as records).

It is not clear how a concerned individual, or a member of the DP Community, might be empowered to somehow influence UKWAC’s collection policies for the better. In the case of the Bernie Grant website, Joanne’s interest was to see minority ethnic groups better represented in UK archival collections; but another approach would be to see it within in the larger group of ‘websites funded by Heritage Lottery Funding’. It seems likely there are many such project sites, all with short-term funding and therefore potentially at risk of being removed from cyberspace at any time, yet containing unique digital materials of huge potential cultural value. As a discrete collection of websites, it has parallels with JISC’s collection focus, ie JISC-funded projects which are occupying web space on a similar short-term lease. How can we persuade the relevant funding bodies to ensure their web outputs are archived, as JISC already does?