Amanda Spencer gave an informative presentation at the UK Web-Archiving Consortium Partners Meeting on 23 July, which I happened to attend. The Web Continuity Project at TNA is a large-scale and Government-centric project, which includes a “comprehensive archiving of the government web estate by The National Archives”. Its aims are to address both “persistence” and “preservation” in a way that is seamless and robust: in many ways, “continuity” seems a very apposite concept with which to address the particular nature of web resources. It’s all about the issue of sustainable information across government.
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.