I take a rather different view to those of Maria and Simon of this story
and others like it. I think the overall message is a very positive
one for web archives in particular.
First, whilst it is good to know that the official archivists of at
least some UK political parties have copies of this content 'for research
purposes', that is not an effective substitute for many of those who might
wish to see them. It is not obvious when following a bookmark or link
and encountering a 'page not found' error that one's next recourse should
be the official archivists of the party. And even if it is, it's not
obvious where to find them. Many may still find access denied even if they
do track down the archivists since there's an implication that one might
need to justify one's 'research purposes' before access is granted.
But there are also other reasons why those official archives aren't enough.
The larger parties may have them, but how many of UKIP, the EDL, the SWP
and any other number of smaller parties can be relied on to do this? Other
collecting archives may well do so, but we have no guarantees. Also, a
political speech held as a paper record is a very different thing from a
speech held on a website. The website gives it a context, as did the event
at which it was first spoken. For political speeches in particular, what
is said often matters a lot less than where and when it is said. Also, we're
able to do things with a collection of digital text that we find more
difficult when presented with individual paper records. (I don't know
if the official archives are keeping the records on paper or digitally, but
I doubt that they are archiving the website.)
But one of the key positive things to emerge for me is one that
counters, to some extent, Maria's concern about the epemeral nature of web
content. She is right to say that web content can be ephemeral if we take
no other action. But web archives around the world have been taking action
for many, many years to combat this. In doing so they are following a model
with some differences from the traditional approach, and initially it has
only been practical to do so at large scale. National archives and libraries
have thus joined the initial pioneers such as the Internet Archive. Critically,
we now have a simple mechanism to allow archived content to be found by
non-expert users no matter where it is - the Memento protocol and the
companion browser plugins. Memento allows the user of a browser to ask to
see a page as it was at some point in the past. Intermediate 'time gates'
will then find the closest match in a web archive. A site that cooperates
in this process will know where its content is archived and can redirect
the user appropriately. Many UK government web sites now work with the
National Archives in this way. Sites based on systems like MediaWiki have
their own internal archives and can serve up past versions of pages directly.
In other cases the time gates do the job for us.
A user with Memento in their browser would have been able to find the archived
versions of these speeches and any content removed from other political sites
without really having to look - just by moving a time slider in their browser.
This was one of the reasons why Memento was a deserved winner of the
Digital Preservation Coalition's digital preservation award in 2010:
http://www.dpconline.org/newsroom/not-so-new/655-memento-project-wins-digital-preservation-award-2010
The existence of web archives does not devalue the work of archivists - far
from it, since I think it is essential that archivists and archive users are
involved and help inform collecting policies. Memento and tools like it
greatly increase the value of the archives and democratise access to them.
Learn more about Memento here:
http://mementoweb.org/
The short videos linked to in the 'Demo' section are a good introduction.
On 18/11/13 10:03, Maria Sienkiewicz wrote:
> I think the important element of this story that we as a profession should be
> making a noise about is that it proves how ephemeral web-based content can be,
> and how it really is no replacement for a properly managed archive. The next
> time someone asks you why we need to keep archives because ‘isn’t everything
> available online these days’, remind them of this.
>
> Maria Sienkiewicz l Group Archivist l**Barclays Group Archives
> Tel +44 (0)161 946 3036 l Int 2880 3036 l Fax +44 (0)161 946 0226 l Email
> [log in to unmask]
> Barclays Group Archives, Dallimore Rd, Wythenshawe, Manchester, M23 9JA
> (internal mailvan 49)
>
> *Discover more about the history of Barclays at
> http://group.barclays.com/about-barclays/about-us#barclays-history*
>
> *From:*Archivists, conservators and records managers.
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] *On Behalf Of *l
> *Sent:* 17 November 2013 13:28
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* Re: Conservatives erase Internet history - Public Sector IT
>
> From what I understand the Bodleian Library, the official archivists of the
> Conservative Party, have copies of the speeches for research purposes. The
> Labour Party's archives are held at the People's History Museum and they have
> also confirmed they have copies of old Labour Party speeches after similar
> concerns were raised about the deletion of some past Labour speeches on the
> website.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PeterK <[log in to unmask]>
> To: ARCHIVES-NRA <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 6:09
> Subject: Conservatives erase Internet history - Public Sector IT
>
> Conservatives erase Internet history - Public Sector IT
> The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from
> the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime
> minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.
>
> Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a
> promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold
> them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.
>
>
> http://bit.ly/1hONhvx
>
> Source:
> http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/11/conservatives-erase-internet-h.html
> See if people are clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/1hONhvx+
> Try the bitly.com <http://bitly.com> sidebar to see who is talking about a page
> on the web: http://bitly.com/pages/sidebar
>
--
Kevin Ashley. Director, Digital Curation Centre http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
E: [log in to unmask] @kevingashley http://slideshare.net/kevinashley
T: +44 131 651 3823 P: DCC, Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
M: +44 7817 402 498 DCC Helpdesk: +44 131 651 1239
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