Guide to Web Preservation Launch at the Opening of IWMW2010

At a time of cuts across the educational sector there is an urgent need to ensure that valuable teaching and learning and research Web-based resources are not lost.

Advice on how Web managers can minimise the risks of loss of such digital resources is provided in a document on Web Preservation launched at the Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW), a national event for University Web managers held at the University of Sheffield over 12-14 July. The Guide to Web Preservation has been published by the JISC-funded Preservation of Web Resources (JISC-PoWR) Project which was operated by UKOLN and ULCC (University of London Computer Centre).

The Guide provides advice not only on the management of resources held on university Web sites but also on best practice when externally hosted services are used to provide access to resources. The Guide can be purchased from the Lulu print-on-demand service for £2.82 (plus p&p). An online version of the guide is available from the JISC PoWR blog.

Members of the JISC-PoWR team from UKOLN and ULCC, together with Susan Farrell, a consultant who edited the Guide, have published a series of video clips which describe the resource and further digital preservation work in which the services are involved.

Brian Kelly, the JISC PoWR project director, described the Guide as "Focussed and pragmatic, explaining the importance of Web preservation and providing members of university Web teams with advice on what to do". In a video summary of the work, Brian has described how the project team, based in Bath and London, made use of a number of Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs and resource-sharing services to support their work. "Since many universities are using Cloud Services to deliver resources, it was important that we made use of such services in order to gain experiences of preservation strategies for content on externally hosted services."

The Guide was launched at the opening of UKOLN's annual Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010), held at the University of Sheffield over 12-14 July.

Please note that the tag for the Guide is #jiscpowr. This tag can be used if you wish to discuss the Guide on services such as Twitter or see what others are saying about it.