JISC Beginner's Guide to Digital Preservation

Earlier this week Brian kelly published a post on how he has used WinHTTrack to create a copy of the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2008 social network. The social network was created using Ning, who have recently cancelled provision of free social networks. In his post – 5 Days Left to Choose a New Ning Plan – Brian talks us through the process taken to mirror the service and also discusses some of the wider implications of use of externally hosted services.

Brian says:

The use of such services to support events, in particular, raises some interesting issues. I have previously suggested that “The lesson I’ve learnt – there’s a need to change the settings for social networks set up to support events after the event is over. I still prefer to make it easy to subscribe to such services, however, in order to avoid any delays caused by the need to accept new subscriptions manually“. But as well as tightening up on access after an event is over in order to avoid spam are futher measures needed? Should the content be replicated elsewhere? Should the social networking site be closed? Or should we be happy with the default option of simply doing nothing – after all, although the announcement stated that the free service would be withdrawn on 20 August, it is still available today.

HTTrack is one of the tools I talked about in my post Web Archiving: Tools for Capturing. It is always interesting to hear case studies of use.