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Hi Piero, Thanks very much for this. You are right and we are in the process of checking any specific Scottish law and there are a few differences. That's an important point. We have also encouraged people not to just migrate everything but make a decision about what can stay and eventually be deleted. They also have an opportunity to bring over content that they want to archive but maybe never publish again. However they would have to create a page for every version they wanted to keep if that page history was needed. Obviously that's not great but at least they are making a conscious decision though. On the whole people don't seem to see this version history as being a necessary step for them. If the content is that important it tends to be stored somewhere else as well e.g. Word doc on a shared drive. We are thinking of taking a copy of a database. So we would have a copy of all the original data. It wouldn't be easy to access but it would be there if it was ever needed. Also in some ways we have taken a copy of the whole site as all published content has been moved into our new CMS and this has version control as well! Thanks very much for your response. Very helpful indeed. Cheers, Bruce Bruce Darby Project Manager +44 (0)131 651 5201 www.ed.ac.uk/website-programme -----Original Message----- From: Piero Tintori [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: 15 October 2015 17:10 To: DARBY Bruce <[log in to unmask]>; [log in to unmask] Subject: RE: Archiving web content Hi Bruce, Certainly best practice would be to remove (or heavily prune) content that isn't needed any more. While the 4 points you raise are valid you should check if Scotland has any retention / statute of limitation laws that would impact you. Even if these are not for "historical archiving" reasons, you may need to keep a copy of content for X years in case evidence is needed for a court case. It's an edge case and one where a decision would need to be made a senior level if you were to totally delete the content. Could an option be for you to index the HTML output of the "old" site into static HTML and save somewhere? Even DVD lodged with your legal department. It wouldn't need your old CMS but at least you'd have a copy for legal reasons. Regards, Piero -----Original Message----- From: Managing institutional Web services [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of DARBY Bruce Sent: 15 October 2015 16:41 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Archiving web content Hi there, I've not contributed to the mailing list before so I'll briefly introduce myself. I'm one of three project managers working to build a new Content Management System for the University of Edinburgh based on the Drupal CMS. We are also migrating all our content from our old CMS to our new one. I'm just wondering if anyone has been thorough a similar process and if so did you archive all the old content? So 2 questions really. 1) Have you archived old web content and if so why and for how long? 2) We are contemplating deleting all our old content (explanation below!). If this fills you with horror could you explain why? Please feel free to email me directly if you don't want to reply to the whole list. Email is [log in to unmask] With folks permission I'll summarise and share with the list. We are contemplating deleting all data due to the cost and difficulty of keeping our old CMS running purely for archival reasons. We don't have anything set up yet within the University that could archive this complex data and keep all the page version history. Also decommissioning servers many years down the line can cause all sorts of problems with no one wanting to take responsibility for the decommissioning process! People are worried about deleting this data for a number of reasons e.g. 1) Legal. Namely Freedom of Information, Data Protection, Limitations Act, being sued for a variety of reasons. 2) Losing historical data 3) Deleting golden copy data 4) Ignoring internal archiving procedure. As far as I can tell none of these have obligations which state categorically that the University 'MUST save this data for these reasons for this long'. People say they 'RECOMMEND we should save the data for X years' to avoid being sued for example but are unable to say how big this risk is. (Anecdotally it seems quite a few court cases are settled very quickly by Universities paying compensation rather than disputing cases anyway. But of course it's very difficult to get these in concrete facts.) As far as I can get tell deleting all data does not have any Freedom of Info or Data Protection issues. In fact it's probably better to delete the data responsibly than hold on to it for no reason. But I want to make sure that I'm not missing that reason. Thanks very much for your help with this. Bruce Bruce Darby Project Manager University Website Programme The University of Edinburgh 21 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LN +44 (0)131 651 5201 www.ed.ac.uk/website-programme -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.