JISC Beginner's Guide to Digital Preservation

I’ve already mentioned my forthcoming trip to Vienna for the 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects – iPres 2010.

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.