I’ve wondered about preservation for new modes of scholarly communication and ephemera, e.g. scholarly blogs, mailing lists, etc. Others have suggested it recently as well. A cursory Googling finds a few others mulling the question, but not (at first glance) anybody actually doing it.
I don’t do much with preservation, so I plead ignorance. Is anybody preserving scholarly blogs (or other “grey” online scholarly resources), other than general-purpose national archiving and the Internet Archive? (Is it en vogue to do Web archiving for certain domains/types of contents vs. general purpose?)
Also, a suggestion: What about an opt-in archiving service for scholarly blogs? (Not opt-in for an individual page, as with WebCite, but for an individual blog/site, to be harvested on a recurring basis.) I don’t suggest it as the end of a solution, but as the beginning of one. An interested library or archive (or consortium) could, I assume, provide such a service fairly cheaply (e.g., someone could build the service in their basement over a weekend). The opt-in could be a simple Web form, asking for the URL of the site and some metadata, maybe also getting a license to provide open access to the preserved copies if the original goes dark. (P.S. Preservation/copyright experts: Is such a license needed?) This might provide a higher level of service than general-purpose Web archiving, e.g. the ability to categorize sites by scientific domain or topic, more frequent/robust archiving than is accorded to pictures of cats with captions, etc.
I imagine I’m glossing over an entire body of literature on the topic. Hopefully someone will let me know where I’m wrong!
Yes, such a license would be necessary.
There’s another rights wrinkle as well: authors own their blog’s words, but they do not necessarily own the blog DESIGN, especially on third-party hosted services such as Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com.
It would be enormously helpful if a delegation of concerned bloggers were to approach these services to ask for at least ONE rights-unencumbered design on their services, for purposes of archival.
Gavin, I’m on the Blue-Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital preservation and Access; right now we have a bunch of economists looking at aspects of the problem, and a bunch of other folk like me thinking of use cases. Preserving the blogosphere (closely followed by the whole other social network space) is a major use case that we have identified that covers some of these issues of ownership and control.
I personally think such an opt-in solution would be great, if we could get someone to step up to it. I made sure both the content and comments on my blog are covered by a CC licence, so it’s doable. CavLec is right that the design may be an issue; on the other hand I rarely see any blog’s design, since I read through NetNewsWire, so I’m inclined to think blogs represent an area where the content is primary and design secondary.
Chris Rusbridge
I don’t think blog design and rights thereto are that big an issue. Content scraping would probably be done with RSS feeds, anyway, which makes most design customizations irrelevant. You’d have a bit of a headache from blogs which use things like embedded images to display mathematical equations — a common hack on physicists’ blogs, for example — but nothing a bit of clever programming couldn’t handle. Rights to the text and image content itself would be the biggest obstacle, I suspect. A decent opt-in scheme would probably handle the text part, but the way some people include images clipped from who-knows-where, an archivist might find themselves in a legal wrangle.
(Incidentally, if one self-promoting link per comment weren’t enough, I also had a few remarks on the Opening Up Education review you posted at Open Access News yesterday.)