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 Toolkit consists of two tools: the KRDS Benefits Framework (Tool 1); and the Value-chain and Benefits Impact tool (Tool 2). Each tool consists of a detailed guide and worksheet(s). Both tools have drawn on partner case studies and previous work on benefits and impact for digital curation/preservation. This experience has provided a series of common examples of generic benefits that are employed in both tools for users to modify or add to as required.

The KRDS Benefits Framework (Tool 1) is the “entry-level” tool requiring less experience and effort to implement and can be used as a stand-alone tool in many tasks. It can also be the starting point and provide input to the use of the Value-chain and Impact analysis.

The Value-chain and Benefits Impact analysis (Tool 2) is the more advanced tool in the Toolkit and requires more experience and effort to implement. It is likely to be most useful in a smaller sub-set of longer-term and intensive activities such as evaluation and strategic planning.

The combined Toolkit provides a very flexible set of tools, worksheets, and lists of examples of generic benefits and potential metrics. These are available for use in different combinations appropriate to needs and level of expertise.

Guides for the toolkit and each individual tool and case studies of completed examples of the worksheets provide documentation and support for your own implementation. They are also available from the Project Web site.