Approaches to Archiving Professional Blogs Hosted in the Cloud

UKOLN is supported by: Approaches to Archiving Professional Blogs Hosted in the Cloud iPRES 2010, Vienna, Austria Tuesday, September 21st 2010 Marieke Guy Research Officer, UKOLN www.bath.ac.uk This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/pres-2010/paper25/

Introduction to UKOLN
UKOLN is a centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities
Library and cataloguing background
Located at the University of Bath, UK
Funded by JISC to advise UK HE and FE communities
Also project funding, including EU funding
Many areas of work including metadata, repositories, dissemination activities, eScience, etc.
Digital preservation projects: DRIVER, CEDARS, eBank, JISC Preservation of Web Resources, Beginners Guide, etc.
Digital Curation Centre

Why blogs? Why in the Cloud?
Ease of creation, ease of use, ease of sharing
Increasingly used for reflecting, analyzing, questioning, critiquing, recording, discussing, learning, etc.
Very important for information professionals
Many dissemination benefits
Lack of institutional blogging infrastructure
UKOLN supports innovation
Cloud is an agile, cost-effective, highly useable way to deliver a service
Now own institutional service and over 15 blogs

The Professional’s blog
Established 2006
750+ posts
240 users per day
Personal style
Institution vs individual?

The Project blog
2008 - 2010
118 posts
141 comments
6 contributors
Professional style

The Event blog
June – August 2009
68 posts
3 contributors + guests
Video, interviews, photos, discussion
Informal/professional style

Why Preserve blogs?
Contain useful information
Information not available elsewhere
Look and feel relevant
Cultural significance
Reliance on 3 rd party services
Blogs disappear (UK HE funding cuts…)
‘ Archiving’ - ways in which blog content can be migrated to alternative environments in order to satisfy a number of business functions
Focus on short-term continuity and management
Could comprise part of a preservation Strategy

Different Approaches:
New Static Master Copy
Backup Copy
Migration to Another Platform
Physical Manifestation
Other technical approaches
What are the issues with each of these?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mnsc/433436548/

New Static Master Copy
Migrate blog to static HTML
Point to new static resource
IWMW – WinHTTTrack static copy
Issues:
No interactivity
Loss of technical architecture e.g. plugins
Loss of other elements e.g comments
Look and feel

Backup Copy
Using XML, using HTML?
Where?
On the server? On a disc? On an external hard drive?
On the same blog platform?
ArchivePress
On alternate blog platform?
JP XML version on Intranet
IWMW static version on Intranet
Issues:
Access

Migration to Another Platform
Live blog to alternate platform
Could just be for data mining purposes – can’t do on current environment
UKWF  VOX platform, RSS feeds used, Yahoo pipes
Export feature
Issues:
Access
Loss of technical architecture e.g. plugins
Loss of other elements e.g comments
Look and feel

Physical Manifestation
Create a hard copy print out e.g. self-publishing
Create PDF of site, RSS2PDF
UKWF Lulu self published book available
Purpose specific
Issues
Obviously not interactive but record unlikely to degrade like other options

Technical Approaches
HTML Scraping
HTTTrack – static Web site created
Third-party Web archiving
UK Web Archive
Internet Archive
Not always complete capture but useful for look and feel
URL submitted for case study blogs

Freezing a blog
Assessment of status of blog
Audit - Get your house in order: links to embeds, comments, spam, etc.
Preliminary posts
Statistics: dates, posts, comments, spam, contributors, theme, plugins, software, licence etc.
Archive page/sidebar widget
Final post
Indication that blog is archived
Close comments
Archive blog
http://www.flickr.com/photos/plousia/93646438/

The Archive Page

General Issues
What constitutes a blog? – content, layout, plugins, comments, tags, images, multimedia, etc.
Who owns a blog?
Identity, copyright, ownership and licences
Privacy
Permissions to access blogs belonging to individuals
Understandability of pages if out of context
Blog policies
Availability

Best Practice Checklist
Planning
Clarification of rights
Monitoring of technologies used
Auditing
Understanding of costs and benefits
Identification and implementation of archiving strategy
Dissemination
Learning
Organisational Audit

Lessons Learnt
Need for a risk assessment framework if using third party services
Importance of planning and writing of blog policy at start of blog lifecycle
Useful to consider a combination of approaches rather than just one
Value of sharing best practice of blog archiving

Questions?
Twitter Id: mariekeguy
Email: m.guy@ukoln.ac.uk
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/MariekeGuy
All resource URLs tagged with ipres2010-blogs: http://delicious.com/mariekeguy/ipres2010-blogs

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Approaches to Archiving Professional Blogs Hosted in the Cloud

by Marieke Guy

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