As well as presenting a paper on Approaches To Archiving Professional Blogs Hosted In The Cloud I will also be presenting a poster and giving a lightning presentation entitled Twitter Archiving Using Twapper Keeper: Technical And Policy Challenges. The full paper is held on the University of Bath repository and was written by Brian Kelly (UKOLN), Martin Hawksey (JISC RSC Scotland N&E), John O’Brien (Twapper Keeper), Matthew Rowe (University of Sheffield) and myself.

The paper explains that Twitter is now widely used in a range of different contexts, ranging from informal social communications and marketing purposes through to supporting various professional activities in teaching and learning and research. The growth in Twitter use has led to a recognition of the need to ensure that Twitter posts (‘tweets’) can be accessed and reused by a variety of third party applications.

It describes development work to the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service to support use of Twitter in education and research. The reasons for funding developments to an existing commercial service are described and the approaches for addressing the sustainability of such developments are provided. The paper reviews the challenges this work has addressed including the technical challenges in processing large volumes of traffic and the policy issues related, in particular, to ownership and copyright.

The paper concludes by describing the experiences gained in using the service to archive tweets posted during the WWW 2010 conference and summarising plans for further use of the service.

A copy of the poster is available on Scribd.

I will be presenting a long late breaking result paper at the conference entitled Approaches To Archiving Professional Blogs Hosted In The Cloud. The full paper is held on the University of Bath repository and was written by Brian Kelly and myself.

This is a practical paper which recognises that early adopters of blogs will have made use of externally-hosted blog platforms, such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com, due, perhaps, to the lack of a blogging infrastructure within the institution or concerns regarding restrictive terms and conditions covering use of such services. There will be cases in which such blogs are now well-established and contain useful information not only for current readership but also as a resource which may be valuable for future generations.

The paper sees that there is a need to preserve content which is held on such third-party services – ‘the Cloud’ provides a set of new challenges which are likely to be distinct from the management of content hosted within the institution, for which institutional policies should address issues such as ownership and scope of content. Such challenges include technical issues, such as the approaches used to gather the content and the formats to be used and policy issues related to ownership, scope and legal issues.

It describes the approaches taken in UKOLN to the preservation of blogs used in the organisation and covers the technical approaches and policy issues associated with the curation of blogs a number of different types of blogs: blogs used by members of staff in the department; blogs used to support project activities and blogs used to support events.

My slides are available on Slideshare and are embedded below.