Issues Surrounding Website Archiving

Have you ever visited a website only to find that a page no longer exist? Well that has happened to me on several occasions.

I found an interesting article that discussed the issues surrounding website archiving. The article was primarily focused on the university level setting and discussed how it is important to preserve websites for future use. The author expressed in great detail reasons as to why archiving websites had many faults. One fault that stood out the most to me was the fact that since archiving is still relatively new it presents problems that print resources don't.

For example, since websites evolve and change day to day or even month to month, there is no guarantee that documents from the website would be preserved forever(Flugstad, 2007). And even though most universities have backup systems in which its sole purpose is to run updates to capture the changes that websites make, they will still fall into many problems because their backup systems are not meant to run for long term purposes. This means that the system will not be able to capture the true metamorphose of a particular site.

SOUND OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!

What are your feelings about archiving websites? Do you think that it should be held in the same respect as archiving print and/or digital resources?

Reference

Flugstad, M.(2007,Fall). Website Archiving: the long-term preservation of local born digital resources. Arkansas Libraries,64(3),5-7.

Meet Some People In Preservation

I found an interesting article that showcased two women from the Library and Information Science field that have been promoted to higher positions in the preservation field. The first woman goes by the name of Diane Vogt-O'Connor. Diane is a double major graduate who holds a degree in Library Science/Archives and Art History/Museums. She was the senior manager of conservation activities at the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Park Services and the Smithsonian Institution (Library of Congress, 2006). In each one of these jobs she served different roles.

Her Roles

National Archive -was the manager of extensive holdings in the regional archives and served as the affiliated archives liaison.

National Park Services - produced several works on preservation, wrote grants, and provided on site consultations to help the staff.

Smithsonian Institution - She served as the director of the Photographic Survey Project and surveyed its 13 million photos from the massive collection.

Through her extensive work she was recognized and promoted to the overseer of the Conservation Division for the Library of Congress.

The other women who was promoted goes by the name of Jeanne Drewes. She was the assistant director for access and worked at Michigan State University. Her duties at Michigan State included overseeing the binding of preservation and collections conservation, stacks maintenance, microfilming, enviornmental monitoring, and management of personnel (Library of Congress, 2006).

Among those jobs Jeanne has also made personel achievements. She has co-authored many books and as also been an asset to many committees that dealt with preservation. That's why she was given the position of cheif binding and collections care.

SOUND OFF!!!!!!!!!!

Who do you know that has made it big in the preservation field?


Reference

Library of Congress. (Jul/Aug, 2006). New Faces in Preservation. Library of Congress Information Bulletin. 65(7/8),190.

The Value of Preservation

When a library has to make a decision on determining what needs be to preserved they have a very important decision that has to be made. They have to determine the community's need for the item, its over all importance, and most importantly libraries have to determine the value in the item that is being preserved.

So just how do they determine the value of something? Well one way is to asses the item to see if it holds cultural value of some sort. They have to see if the item is held in high standards by the community as a whole. Another way is to examine the range of public policy issues that arise in light of the social values identified (Smith, 2007).

According to Smith, in order for librarians to understand the value in information they need to understand how crucial preservation is by looking at the following factors:
-the usefulness of content
-the value of content as constitutive of our human nature, including its importance for ensuring biological homeostasis (special value) and its ability to give pleasure (hedonic value);
-the value for re-use (secondary value).

Overall one must look at the bigger picture before they try to start preserving information. We as librarians need to be able to look deeper into the facts and understand the real reason why we need to preserve.

Reference

Smith, A. (2007, Summer). Valuing Preservation. Library Trends, 56(1), 4-25.

Ready for school?

I found an interesting article that talked about training library professionals to help them with digitally preserving information. The training was a workshop that began around 1995 and lasted until 2005. The workshop was presented by the Northeast Document Conservation Center(NEDCC)and their main focus was preservation. Within the workshop their goal was to stress the importance of standards, quality, and assuring long-term access to digital collections (Russell, 2007). Many of the professionals that attended these workshops had no previous interaction with digitally preserving materials so the NEDCC had to deal with teaching them how to get started. To address this issue they held discussions on whether they should or should not digitize information.

Throughout the course of the trainings there was one thing that become more and more relevant to the NEDCC instructors. They began to notice trends throughout all their trainings. They noticed that more and more people who were attending the trainings were expecting to be told word for word how to digitally preserve information. This wasn't what the NEDCC wanted to do. So they basically held discussions where the professionals were able to go back to their jobs with a list of questions so that they can begin to ask questions in the planning stages of their digital projects.

This was a very interesting article to read because it helped me to be aware of the issues that professionals deal with when it comes to digitally preserving information. I think that more and more trainings should be available for individuals, not only because someone is new to a job, but also because over the years things can change and people need to be updated on how to do those new things.

SOUND OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you think that library professionals should be given the opportunity to attend workshops like the one that the NEDCC offered? Yes or no, and why.


Reference

Russell, A. (2007). Training professionals to preserve digital heritage: the school for scanning.Library Trends,56(1),288-297.

Digital Preservation

Digital preservation is a very hot topic for many libraries around the world. They all have the same goal of trying to archive information that is of high relevance for researchers every where. But when it comes to the question of what and how they should digitally preserve information from the Web, issues always arise. So the National Libraries began to develop some approaches to help build up their publication archive. Some of those approaches included using a robot to automatically select resources that are likely to be of research value. Which meant that there was less human interaction involved. Another included archiving based on a agreement with selective commercial publishers. So they were able to constantly build their archives with out having to search high and low for relevant materials.

Although most of these Libraries found ways to digitally preserve they were still faced with disadvantages. Some of those disadvantages included the labor issues. They had to hire more staff to get the work done since the preserving process had lots of material. Another disadvantage was that they were basically going in blind with preserving material that they felt would be needed for future users. This was a major issue because its hard to tell what a future researcher would need when researching.

So back to the main question at heart. What should be preserved? I feel the things that are held of high value should be preserved. And what should be digitally preserved for archives should also be based on judgement of what is relevant and has high value. Meaning I wouldn't preserve someones post from a blog, but I would preserve someones article from a scholarly journal.

SOUND OFF!!!!!

What are your feelings about digital preservation?


Phillips, M. E.(2005, Summer). What Should We Preserve? The Question for Heritage Libraries in a Digital World. Library Trends, 54(1), 57-71.