Providing Access to an EU-funded Project Web Site after Completion of Funding

Background

Exploit Interactive [1] was a pan-European Web magazine, which was funded by the European Commission's Telematics for Libraries programme. The magazine was one of the project deliverable of the EXPLOIT project, which aimed to promote the results of EU library projects and to facilitate their take-up by the market of library and information systems. The magazine ran for seven issues between May 1999 and October 2000. During its lifetime the magazine developed and maintained a strong and involved community of Exploit Interactive readers, authors, project partners and information providers and provided a forum for discussion within the EU Telematics for Libraries community.

Problem Being Addressed

Prior to the the last issue being published it was recognised that maintaining the site could possibly be a problem. Funding would cease and there would no longer be a member of staff working on the site.

Note that this case study does not address the wider long-term preservation issues. In particular it does not address:

The formats of the resources: if the file formats used (mainly HTML, CSS JPEG and GIF) become obsolete, we do not address how access can be obtained.
The functionality of the service provided: if the service becomes unavailable (e.g due to an operating system upgrade) we do not guarantee that the service will be restored.
Access to resources if the host institution ceased to exist: we do not guarantee to provide access if our organisation ceases to exist.
Access to resources due to catastrophe: we do not guarantee to provide access in the event of catastrophes, such as a fire which destroys the server and backups.

The case study provides a pragmatic approach to access to the Web site after the project funding has finished.

The Approach Taken

It was decided to agree on a short-medium term access strategy for the Exploit Interactive Web site. This strategy would list policies and procedures for maintenance of the site for the next 10 years. It would also allow us to allocate money to certain activities.

10 years was decided upon primarily because the preservation industry rule of thumb is that data should be migrated every 10 years. It is unlikely that we will have the resources to migrate the Exploit Interactive Web site.

Short-Medium Term Access Strategy

The Web site's domain name will be kept for at least 3 years after the end of funding.
We will seek to ensure the Web site continues for at least 10 years after the end of funding.
We will seek to ensure that the Web site continues to function, although we cannot give an absolute commitment to this.
We will not commit to fixing broken links to external resources.
We will not commit to fixing non-compliant HTML resources.

We will use the following procedures:

We will have internal administrative procedures to ensure that the domain name bill is paid (even if current staff leave).
We will record the disk space usage of the Web site and provide an estimate of the cost of providing this disk space (in order to monitor the disk space usage costs).
We will run a link checker at least annually and record the number of internal broken links. We will keep an audit trail so that we can see if internal links start breaking.
We will use the UKOLN online calendar to remind staff when to rerun the check.
Any changes to the policy which would result in the Web site being removed need to be agreed by an appropriate management group. This would not be done for purely technical reasons.

The area on which Exploit Interactive is held was measured:

Disk Size: 3.92 Gb (3920 Mb)
Exploit Interactive live site: 62.9 Mb
Exploit Interactive development site: 70.3 Mb
Exploit Interactive log files: 292 Mb
Exploit Interactive currently takes up 425.4 Mb of disk space.

The cost of this space is negligible bearing in mind you can purchase 30 Gb disk drives for about £40.

We have established that the domain name has been paid for until 23^rd October 2008. We feel this is a sufficiently long period of time.

Problems Experienced

Two years on from the end of funding there have been very few problems adhering to the access strategy. The domain name has been held and a regular link checking audit has been initiated [2] Time spent on the maintenance of the site, such as link checking, has been minimal (about 30 minutes per year to run a link check and provide links to the results).

There are a number of potential problems which we could face:

The Web site could stop working due to technical difficulties (for example, if the operating system was upgraded it might be necessary to upgrade the backend scripting software.
The Web site may fail WAI Web accessibility guidelines and there could be legal liabilities in continuing to host the Web site.
The Web site may be too search-engine friendly and searches from Google, etc. may find out-of-date resources from the Exploit Interactive Web site rather than more up-to-date resources provided by UKOLN.

However in practice we think such possibilities are unlikely.

We are confident that we will be able to continue to host this resource for at least 3 years and for a period of up to 10 years. However this is, of course, dependent on our organisation continuing to exist during this period.

References

Exploit Interactive
<http://www.exploit-lib.org/>
Exploit Interactive Link Check
<http://www.exploit-lib.org/link-check/>

Contact details

Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
UK
Tel: +44 1225 385105

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