Comments on: Disappearing Conference Web Sites: Learning From the EUNIS Experience

By: Dominik Lukes (@techczech)

Dominik Lukes (@techczech) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:39:59 +0000

I agree. I think universities are failing to live up to their responsibility of knowledge preservation. It’s not just conferences but even old versions of their websites.

I have long advocated that some body like JISC should simply fund an Academic archive that would not only preserve but also assign UUIDs to all digital content so that they can be tracked down later.

It’s amazing to me that it still hasn’t happened.

As somebody who has organized a few conferences in the past, I know how hard it is to archive the website. Conference organizers need better tools. For instance, a lot of distributions (like Drupal or WordPress) for organizing conferences are designed for the single conference with little or no thought given to archiving it. And most conferences don’t even use tools like these that would make it easy.

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:30:24 +0000

Thanks Virginia.

As is often the case these days, much of the feedback on blog posts comes via Twitter. In particular the following comments are worth capturing.

@hvdsomp pointed out that:

JCDL has snapshot archives of past conference web sites http://t.co/QCMnE2ZM Some originals taken over e.g. http://t.co/2L0hf62N

@libnik shared his annoyances:

Equally annoying: ‘rolling’ conference sites that have a permanent URL but only contain the latest year’s content.

@thislast gave his thoughts on where responsibilities may lie:

It looks like part of a reluctance among administrators & scholars to value the work of librarians. But see http://t.co/8SLsLJzU

By: Virginia Knight

Virginia Knight — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:43:13 +0000

The research computing group at Manchester University is only part of the continuation of Manchester Computing (where I used to work), which also included MIMAS. (I don’t think the MIMAS website would have helped you though, as it seems not to be searchable!)

Link rot is still very much with us despite the availability of automatic redirection of URLs and domains. I went through my collection of bookmarks recently and found that about 7-8% of the URLs no longer took me to what I’d bookmarked. The proportion of work-related URLs which failed in this way appeared to be no lower than that of the collection as a whole. It’s still not unknown for whole domains to vanish utterly because redirection to an explanatory page was not included in the exit strategy (this happened for example to the BOPCAS service). More commonly there is a reorganisation of a website and only the continuity of what is thought currently important is preserved. Online information which existed only as a downloadable document seems to be particularly vulnerable, although with the increased use of repositories the loss of this will I hope become rarer.