Work has being going on at the University of Northampton to develop a ‘sustainable web site’. The site designed to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) outreach activities is being funded through a Nuffield Science Bursary.

The project is looking at different aspects of web sustainability. They have begun with an investigation of possible tools and approaches for web sustainability. Their findings have been shared through the following blog posts:

• Best free tools for website sustainability (which looks at Freeway Pro, MAGIX Website Maker, NVU, Sandvox, Breezi, DevHub, Wix, Weebly)
• How to get it out there for pennies (which looks at Web hosting services)

The site itself is being hosted using Weebly because of its easy of use, free tools and free hosting. It is believed to be sustainable because:

• It has been design to be relatively simple to maintain
• Uses free tools
• Uses free web-hosting
• Relatively easy to transfer management
• Relatively easy to wrap most of the site and largely move it to another host.

A user guide to maintaining the site has also been produced design to be simple to understand.

The BBC has now completed a series of online films looking at looking at research carried out to support the BBC archives. The films are around 10 minutes each and each look at a particular area of work.

• Part 6 – New Kinds of Metadata
• Part 5 – Finding the Content
• Part 4 – A Strategy for the Industry
• Part 3 – Future Proofing
• Part 2 – Keeping Ahead of Obsolescence
• Part 1 – R&D and Archive Research