A coalition of the willing is battling legal, logistical and technical obstacles to archive the riches of the mercurial World Wide Web for the benefit of future scholars

A follow-up letter to this article by Brian Kelly was printed in the Times Higher Education of 15 September 2011. It describes how the JISC is part of the coalition of stakeholders who are helping to engage with preservation of digital resources. The letter summarises UKOLN’s role in managing developments to the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service and describes how Twapper Keeper was used to archive over 6,000 tweets posted at the recent ALT-C 2011 Conference.

A paper entitled Twitter archiving using Twapper Keeper: Technical and Policy Challenges, which was presented at the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2010), described how the project team addressed the technical difficulties and strategic issues associated with Twitter archiving.

The Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools Project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and will run from 1 February to 31 July 2011.

The project  aims to test, review and promote combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Taxonomy and the Value Chain and Impact Analysis tool first applied in the I2S2 Project  for assessing the benefits and impact of digital preservation of research data. We will extend their utility to and adoption within the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation. We will demonstrate and critique the tools, and then create and disseminate the toolset and accompanying materials such as user guides and factsheets to the wider community.

The project plan and project outputs will be available from the Project Web site in due course. A dissemination event to mark the conclusion of the project will be held in central London on 12 July 2011. (Further details and registration will be announced in May.)

The project partners are UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Bath, the Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education (CHIME) at University College London , the UK Data Archive (University of Essex), the Archaeology Data Service (University of York),  OCLC Research, and  Charles Beagrie Limited.