Thursday 7 May 2009

Article on ABC Online by former UTAS librarian

Those of us who have been here for a long time may remember Paul Koerbin working with us as a liaison librarian. He's now the National Library's web archiving manager, and has an article on ABC Online today

Hit save before dot-com becomes dot-gone

"If we don't take steps to resource and support the methodical preservation of our public web culture we stand to lose huge slabs of it into the void of time...

1 comment:

Felix Wilson said...

This does raise some interesting issues for collection development I think. Whose responsibility is the preservation of websites? State libraries? National libraries? What about content that is not tied to a particular national identity or domain? Who decides what to preserve, and how can anyone preserve content that is locked behind a login when the copyright owner guards their IP fiercely? Does commercial content warrant preservation and can it be preserved e.g Amazon.com? Does anyone at UTAS take responsibility for the preservation of old versions of web content?
Also, as discussed, so much of what is available online is dependent on multiple sources of data feeding from other locations, how can the experience of looking at say, facebook, be replicated when the other external data is unavailable?