JISC Beginner's Guide to Digital Preservation

Owen Stephens, a friend and colleague of mine has just started work on a JISC commissioned Guide to Open Bibliographic Data for use by managers, practitioners and developers in the library community.

He’s planning to create the guide in WordPress, he wants the guide to be a useful and powerful online resource, he wants commenting on different sections, he wants to have different views on the sections…

It’s all starting to sound very familiar. These are some of my intentions with the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation.

Owen’s thoughts on what he calls Multi-faceted document navigation are available from his blog. He’s also created a demonstrator site.

There is a lot going on. He’s used a Query Multiple Taxonomies plugin and is using custom taxonomies and taxonomy templates – a much detailed approach than using just tags and categories.

He’s also using an inline post plugin to allow him to embed content from one post in another post.

I know I need to spend a lot more time looking at the plugins WordPress has available. At a recent event I attended a workshop session on WordPress beyond blogging.

The session, presented by Joss Winn from the University of Lincoln left me inspired but slightly unsure about what to do next. My blogs are housed by our systems team, so there I have to ‘ask’ for things I’d like. This isn’t a problem (by that I mean they are keen to help out) but it can be a time delay and I don’t really get to play as much as I’d like to (or should).

I think my final guide won’t be as ambitious as Owen’s but I hope it is a useful and powerful online resource.