Save That Site!
Librarians (and others) worry about the preservation of digital information. For instance, all of the blogs about the Katrina disaster--aren't these the primary documents, the journals, the diaries, of tomorrow's historian? (Stepping down from the soapbox) --if you have a need to archive web sites, this post from Resource Shelf offers three free solutions for local storage and off-line browsing.
Image from the Sandusky County Scrapbook
Category: Web_
posted by Melba Tomeo at 4:52 PM
4 Comments:
This is great information. I'll definitely share it with our education majors. Thanks for posting it!
I wondered if it would be useful or not. I used to find myself in classrooms with no internet access and used some pay software to capture sites so I could use them with classes. I am sure it is more common now to have the internet in the classroom, but is it pervasive? Would this still be useful for setting up a learning center or something?
For me, the appeal is twofold:
First, to save material that is easily lost...like the blogs you mentioned. Blogs can open & close quickly so it would be helpful to have a record of the posts. Having primary source material is something we encourage our education majors to incorporate into lessons. Though it may be a case that you don't think to archive the resource until it's gone.
Second, to assist teachers who want to access material multiple times very quickly. While Internet is available, bandwidth and reliability are still issues. I think it will be useful to archive the sites to limit the amount of bandwidth being used which impacts system performance. And to limit the issue of losing a resource due to a changed URL from one semester to the next.
However, in thinking about archiving materials, I wonder how to cite such materials and how to stay within copyright/fair use limits. Any guidance?
Those are great questions, Leigh, as I always say when I don't know the answer!
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