The ArchivePress project addresses what we perceive as a gap in the market and has been developed in response to the changing nature of content published on the web. It is a collaborative initiative between the University of London Computing Centre (ULCC) and the British Library (BL). Funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), it brings together the combined experience of experts in digital preservation and web archiving, particularly in such initiatives as the JISC PoWR project and the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC), to address the challenges and potential of blogs as a class of dynamic information resource, distinct from other types of websites.
ArchivePress is intended to be a lightweight, off-theshelf, blog content archiving tool that can easily be installed by organisations and projects, in order to facilitate preservation of blog output by multiple individuals or groups potentially using diverse blogging tools, platforms, or hosts. It works by drawing on the full power of the WordPress plug-in system and the rich functionality offered by associated RSS feeds. The project’s target group is, in the first instance, academic institutions, though we appreciate that the tool has far broader reaching applicability, particularly in the cultural heritage and
scientific sectors.
The project has three key aims:
- To create plug-ins for WordPress that will enable
it to work as a blog archiving tool;
- To create demonstrator instances of the ArchivePress system in use, using groups of blogs
nominated by institutions with ongoing, active blogging outputs, in order to demonstrate,
compare, and analyse the results of the project approach;
- To assess the effectiveness of this approach and promote discussion and debate among the
community including web managers, bloggers, and web archiving specialists.
Legal issues, including permissions and copyright are out of scope of the project, though we recognise that users of the tool need to ensure they have appropriate permissions before collecting and repurposing content.
Participating institutions are:
- The UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC). DCC runs at least three blogs on Blogger.com. Most
posts are text only.
- UKOLN at the University of Bath. UKOLN staff run approximately twelve blogs on a variety of
platforms, some on their own self-hosted installations of WordPress, some at WordPress.com, and others on Blogger.com. Posts typically include a range of content, including text, images, and embedded slideshare files.
- Lincoln University. Lincoln provides a multi-user WordPress instance for staff use. Approximately nine are currently available to the project. As with UKOLN, posts typically include a range of
content types.
- The British Library. The BL provides a Typepad platform to support corporate blogging activities.
Approximately twenty blogs are currently hosted, incorporating a range of content from alphanumeric text (including unusual characters) to embedded multimedia files.
The main outputs of the project include:
- An open source WordPress plug-in based on the Wordpress plug-in API. This is being developed
using Google Code, and is published and publicised using the WordPress themes website;
- Supporting research into academic attitudes towards blog archiving and the significant properties of blogs;
- Documentation and guidelines on installing and configuring the plug-in(s), and on managing the
archive.
The project has so far explored two key aspects: academic attitudes to blogging and blog archiving, and development of the demonstrator tool.
σχετικά links :
4. Project JISC-PoWR
