Cultural Heritage

In the news recently is the warning from a group of leading libraries in the UK that we are heading for a “digital black hole”. This is because the current wording of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act means that archiving Web sites can only be done with the owners persmission, so major libraries such as the British Library face a big overhead on their archiving programme in terms of time taken to identify, locate and contact the owners. British Library chief executive Dame Lynn Brindley estimates that this restriction means that just 1% of free UK Web sites will be archived by 2011.

As the BBC news item notes, ephemera is a useful source of information to social historians on many levels. It’s not just the content (e.g. political party pamphlets, concert programmes, flyers about anything and everything) but also the look and feel of these items – each era has its own distinctive look in graphic design. The same goes for Web sites – if you are able to look at older Web sites that haven’t had a recent makeover you’ll see the difference. And that is the nub of the problem – the sites that have disappeared entirely or whose content has changed dramatically over time.

This got me wondering about how many library, museum and archive Web sites self-archive? What happens to all the old content when a project finishes or you have a major redesign or contract out the Web site provision to an external service?

So what do you do? A good first step is to read about the issues and some of the practical steps you can take. The UKOLN CUltural Heritage team have produced a series of briefing documents on digital preservation. These include Mothballing Your Web Site, Preserving Your Homepage, Top Ten Tips for Web Site Preservation and most importantly Developing Your Digital Preservation Policy.