Memoranda Blog
Preserving Research Projects’ websites
The quality research project management often requires creation and maintenance of the research project’s website that is used to make available the new developments and results. But what happens to such website when the project and its funding end?
Inside Installations use case
Few months ago, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) contacted us to expose its situation:
Inside Installations Project, Preservation and Presentation of Installation Art, was a research project (2004-2007) into the management and conservation of installations and was supported by the European Commission’s Culture 2000 programme.
Rapid obsolescence of media technologies, interactivity and, for instance, the site specific character of many installations are a challenge for prevailing views about long-term conservation, documentation and presentation. Thirty complex installations (many multimedia) were re-installed, investigated and documented.
By sharing their experience partners worked together to develop guidelines for conservation, re-installation and documentation of installation art.
The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands was the coordinator of the project, which was co-organised by:
- Tate, London;
- Restaurierungszentrum, Düsseldorf;
- Stedelijk Museum for Modern Art (S.M.A.K.), Ghent;
- Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
- and the Foundation for the Conservation of Modern Art (SBMK) in The Netherlands.
In this framework, they developed a high content website (Online Version). (Archived Version)
More than four years after finishing the project, maintaining this website means a certain annual expense for the coordinator, who does not have specific funding for this.
Which alternatives did he have?
- To continue to fund the website himself, or ask for contributions to other institutions,
- To close the website, remove all content and make it unavailable,
- Or to archive it and ensure an open access to its Web archive.
Internet Memory proposes solutions
The consortium decided to follow Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) initiative: to buy the archival of the project website “www.inside-installations.org” once and for good and thus to preserve results of the European project Inside Installations.
The process of Web archiving and preservation was delegated to Internet Memory Foundation.
See archived version captured in February 2012.
Results of such Web archiving initiatives
* Websites are preserved and therefore they might remain a part of the cultural heritage for decades.
* They are publicly available online.
* This solution is less expensive than maintaining websites that are not any more updated.
Web archiving as an efficient solution to offer a second life to your project websites!
Internet Memory proposes solutions to archive and preserve high quality websites such are research projects’ websites thanks to its automated Web archiving platform, ArchivetheNet.
Leveraging Web Archives for Research
TWAW is new workshop which ambition is to help shaping and establishing a community of interest on the research challenges and possibilities resulting from the introduction of the time dimension in Web analysis.
By it’s very nature, the Web has a rich relation to time. Emerging and disappearing unpredictably from any part of the planet, reflecting, sometime by the minute events of the real world, full of assertions about the past as well as the future, made at any time of a complex mix of old and new content items linked together, the Web represent a challenging object for temporal-centric research. The difficulty to get appropriate material for this research (time series corpora, large scale archives etc.), adds to the difficulty of exploring the Web’s temporal dimension.
Yet, the benefits for research are huge. Trends analysis, emergence of concept or ideas, representation of the past and the future, network dynamic, shaping and decay of communities, and in general, any Web research topic where a dynamic understanding is superior to a static view, requires integration of the time dimension.
This is where Web archives can help significantly, bringing the structured series of material needed for this type of research.
The Internet Memory, together with Yahoo Research and Max Planck Society, is happy to organize the first Temporal Web Analytic Workshop (TWAW), in conjunction with the WWW conference (www2011) in Hyderabad (India). It’s Monday 28/3, come and join us if you can! If not, you can check the proceedings here.