Unfortunately I haven’t been able to give this blog the love and attention it deserves due to other work. I’ve decided that it makes sense to officially close the blog. Thanks for reading.

Blog Statistics

I am publishing the following statistics for future reference. They are intended to inform others about the lifecycle of the blog and assist people wishing to reuse resources by identifying the authors of articles etc.

Active Dates: From 27 April 2010 to 19 December 2012
Number of posts: 89 published posts
Number of comments: 61
Akismet statistics: 3,694 spams caught, 16 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.838%.
Author: Marieke Guy, UKOLN
Details of blog theme:
WP-Andreas09
Details of plugins used:
Delicious widget, Google analytics, Library thing, WPCAS
Details of type and version of software used:
This blog now runs on WordPress Version 3.4.2.
Blog licence:
This blog is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence (Attribution – Non-commercial – Share Alike).

Deadline have posted a great piece on how Irvine Welsh nearly lost much of the text of his new novel Skagboys because it was held on an Amstrad computer.

Welsh had written over 10,000 extra words when writing Trainspotting back in 1993 and didn’t migrate the text. After failing to buy an Amstrad on ebay he hired a specialist technician to retrieve the copy.

He said: “When I wrote Trainspotting I had 100,000 words at the start and another 100,000 at the end that I didn’t use.

“The stuff at the end I put into other books. The stuff at the beginning I had on some old Amstrad disks.

“I thought, I’ve gotta get this sorted. I tried to but an Amstrad on eBay, then I found a guy who could transpose the stuff on the disks.”

The Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) is a 30-month EU digitisation project for contemporary art. One of their deliverables is a set of Guidelines for a Long-term Preservation Strategy for Digital Reproductions and Metadata. The document has been described as “very readable: they use accessible language; no jargon, a pleasure to read” by one of my colleagues. The guidelines are available in PDF format from the DCA site.

Or a month in the case of TwapperKeeper….

The TwapperKeeper site, which I’ve mentioned many a time on this blog, now features a worrying message –

“Twapper Keeper’s archiving is now available in HootSuite! As a result, we will be shutting down Twapper Keeper. Existing archives will be kept running until Jan 6, 2012, after which you will not be able to access your archives anymore. Thanks for using TwapperKeeper – we look forward to seeing you at HootSuite.“

This could cause people to panic but luckily help is at hand. The following posts all offer advice on how to extract your archives and preserve them for the future.

• UK Web Focus: Responding to the Forthcoming Demise of TwapperKeeper
• Ouseful: Rescuing Twapperkeeper Archives Before They Vanish, Redux
• MASHe: Free the tweets! Export TwapperKeeper archives using Google Spreadsheet

I actually used Martin Hawksey’s excellent (and easy to use) Google Spreadsheet [Twitteralytics v2] to pull out a number of Digital Curation Centre archives. It took me a relatively short amount of time and they are now available as public Google docs spreadsheets and as excel files in our Sharepoint.

It’s clear that our reliance on third party services is increasingly requiring us to keep on our toes when it comes to digital preservation. Who is to know which services will dissapear in 2012…?

Feeling festive yet?

The UK Web Archive has just launched their 2011 Advent Calendar. Every day they will post about a different resource that’s freely available in the UK Web Archive. You’ll be able to find out a little bit about the resource and browse it via the UKWA website.

Day one has kicked off with the ‘Stolen Votes: Save Democracy’ site which was archived as part of the UK General Election 2005 collection.

For more information see the UK Web archive blog.

Unfortunately the DCC Brighton Roadshow was cancelled but the next roashow isn’t far off and places are still available.

To give some background….

The UK Digital Curation Centre is running a series of free inter-linked regional workshops aimed at supporting institutional research data management planning and training. The DCC Roadshows are designed to allow every institution in the UK to prepare for effective research data management and understand more about how the DCC can help. The sixth DCC Roadshow is being organised in conjunction with Cambridge Library and will take place from 9th – 11th 2011 November in the Paston Brown Room at the Homerton Conference Centre, Cambridge.

The roadshow runs over three days but each workshop can be booked individually. Attendees are encouraged to select the workshops which address their own particular data management requirements. The workshops will provide advice and guidance tailored to a range of staff, including PVCs Research, University Librarians, Directors of IT/Computing Services, Repository Managers, Research Support Services and practising researchers.

Day one is an introductory day aimed at researchers, data curators, staff from library etc. It provides an introduction to the DCC and the role of the DCC in supporting research data management. Day two is a more interactive day aimed at senior managers, research PVCs/Directors, directors of Information Services etc. and looks at strategy/policy implementation. Day three is a hands-on day and consists of the Digital Curation 101 – How to manage research data: tips and tools workshop.

To find out more about the workshops take a look at the DCC Cambridge Roadshow page. Registration for the workshop is free but places are limited.

If you can’t decide if the roadshow is for you Steve Walsh from the Interoperable Geospatial Data for Biosphere Study( IGIBS) Project, Aberystwyth University, has written a review of the most recent workshop held in Oxford.

Details of further roadshows will be announced soon on the DCC Web site.

Deborah Wilson is currently undertaking a research study into digital obsolescence; the results of which she will be happy to share once the analysis is complete. To benefit from quality data she is asking that people complete an online survey. The survey is tailored to those working in the records management area but all working with digital data are welcome to fill it in.

The survey will take no longer than 10 minutes to complete and your participation is greatly appreciated.

Please note that any personal data collected as a result of this survey will be made anonymous and will not be disclosed to any third party or processed for any other purpose.

An exhibition on the history of the Web and Web design will run in New York this month.

The exhibition, Digital Archaeology, debuted at Internet Week Europe 2010 and “charts the disruptive moments of web design and celebrates the characters behind its radical evolution“.

The exhibition will show case 28 important Web sites including: The Project – the first website, published by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1991, and Word.com – One of the earliest and most influential e-zines, a true multimedia experience, incorporating games, audio, and chat.

An introduction to the exhibition explains…

“The web is just 20 years old, yet it has transformed our lives utterly, down to the bone. We do, see, hear, share, copy, sell, buy, interact, relate with authority and participate in society differently. Things will never be the same again. Over this short time, technological and communications developments have been so fast that the groundbreaking work of the early creative pioneers, produced on now defunct hardware and software, have disappeared almost as soon as they appeared, like Mayflies in spring doomed to die as the daylight fades.

Soon we will know less about these HTML blossomings than we do about the relief carvings in Mohenjo-Daro or the Yucatán. While they helped define our new culture, almost none of the websites of less than two decades ago can be seen at all. Today, when almost a quarter of the earth’s population is online, this most recent artistic, commercial and social history is being wiped from the face of earth and a hundred million hard drives lie festering in recycling yards or rusting in landfills.”

In his article on the exhibition entitled Internet history is vanishing into thin air Allan Hoffman asks:

“Does your company have a working, surfable copy of its first website or the second or third versions? Probably not. But if your company published an annual report or even a newsletter in 1954 or 1999, you can bet someone saved it, and you could dig up a copy.“

It seems Web preservation has at last hit the mainstream.

I’m aware that recently I haven’t spent a lot of time adding post to this blog. Life and other projects have got in the way! However I do like to keep up to date with Digital Preservation news and wanted to share some of the best news blogs and RSS feeds available:

• Digital Curation Centre News – there is both a news RSS feed and an events RSS feed.

• Digital Preservation Coalition News – there is a news RSS feed and you can also follow William Killbride on Twitter. The DPC also publishes a monthy news summary entitled What’s New.

• Library of Congress News – with a news RSS feed and a NDIIP Twitter account.

• The National Archives News – they have RSS feeds for news and new document releases.

Signing up to these resources should keep you up to date with what’s happening in the digital preservation world.

The Library of Congress has recently released the Preserving Our Digital Heritage: The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 2010 Report (NDIIPP) – available in PDF.

NDIIPP have now spent over a decade working to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

The report documents the achievements of the Library of Congress and its NDIIPP partners working together to create sustainable long-term access to digital materials.

Since NDIIPP was founded in 2000 by an act of Congress, a network of over 185 partners in 44 states and 25 countries have developed a distributed technical infrastructure, preserved over 1400 at-risk collections, and have made strides to support a legal environment conducive to digital preservation.

The report describes a decade of action in digital preservation and outlays the short- and long-term plans to ensure libraries, archives and other heritage institutions in the United States can collect and provide long-term access to the resources of the 21st Century, and beyond.

The full press release is available from the NDIIP site.