Digital Preservation Matters - 26 September 2008

iPres 2008 Web archiving. Digital Curation Blog. 30 September 2008.

Thorstheinn Hailgrimsson: Some web tools include Heretrix crawler, Web Curator from BL/NZNL, and Netarchive Curator Tool Suite from Denmark, plus access tools including NutchWAX for indexing, and an open source version of the Wayback machine. Three main approaches to web archiving: bulk, selective based on criteria, and event-based such as around an election, disaster, etc.

Helen Hockx Yu: Biggest problem is that legal deposit legislation not yet fully implemented, and without a legislative mandate, permission-based archiving is slow and typical success rate is 25%.

Birgit Henriksen: Access to web archive is only for research and statistical purposes, which is hard to implement. They do bulk harvests quarterly, selective sites more frequently (sometimes daily), and event-based archiving.

Gildas Illian: Challenge of change: digital curators not a new job, need to change librarianship.

Colin Webb: Challenges are interconnected: what we want to collect, what we’re allowed to collect, what we’re able to collect, and what we can afford to collect.

Preservation Of Web Resources: The JISC PoWR Project. Brian Kelly, et al. UKOLN at iPres conference. 30 September 2008. Slides.

Challenges of web archiving: How do you select material? It is the information or the ‘experience’ of the web page that is important? How can you move web documents between curatorial environments? “Even those who care about information persistence don’t necessarily do a good job of it on their Web sites.” Not everything on the web needs to be kept. The JISC PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) project has created a blog and workshops to help develop best practices for web archiving. There are legal challenges and that brings some risks.

Universities have business continuity interests that need to be protected, and an interest in protecting, managing and preserving certain types of web content: "websites may be a unique repository for evidence of institutional activity which is unrecorded elsewhere, and this is often unacknowledged” . If unique records are being created, stored and published on the web, then we must establish their authenticity as records and determine if they are trustworthy versions of pages.

There is also a responsibility to staff and students for things put on the web by the university. “Research interests are reflected in the increasing number of Web resources that have potential longevity and re-use value, a category that may include scientific research outputs and e-learning objects.” Web managers and record managers should cooperate on preserving the web content.

Concerning how to preserve the web environment: look at data import/export; what is the cost of migration; is this sustainable; what are the risks of loss or of not using the service. We need to raise awareness of these important issues. The project will deliver a handbook of web archiving.

Copyright Act change shifts software rights. Ulrika Hedquist. Computerworld. 29 September, 2008

A change in New Zealand’s copyright law may affect who owns software. An amendment to the Copyright Act was introduced that would repeal the commissioning rule for software developers.

The general rule is that the creator of an artistic work or software holds the copyright to it. The commissioning rule is an exception which means that the commissioner of a work is the default copyright holder. Under the current rule, software developers have no rights to code developed for clients unless there is a contract in place saying otherwise. If enacted, the amendment could make significant changes to the industry.