JISC

Start date: 28 April 2008

End date: 29 September 2008

Funding programme: Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme

Project website: http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Committees: JISC Integrated Information Environment committee

The aim of this work was to raise awareness amongst the web manager community of the need to incorporate preservation strategy into key stages of the web management process, the implicit assumption being that there has, to date, been insufficient sharing of practice and transferral of knowledge between the UK HE/FE Web Management community and other groups responsible for digital preservation and records management processes.

In common with organisations across all sectors, university websites are the principal digital marketing tool for those institutions and as such, they are required to look appropriate, function seamlessly and provide users with a wealth of easy to navigate and up-to-date information. What is often unacknowledged, however, is that these same websites may also be a unique repository for evidence of institutional activity which is unrecorded elsewhere, and (viewed collectively) may provide interesting insights into the development of Higher and Further Education digital initiatives over the course of the last fifteen years in ways that have yet to be formally codified.

The JISC PoWR project undertook to run three workshops to consult with members of relevant communities. The resultant discussions from these workshops, along with the deliberations of the project team - much of which is reflected on the JISC PoWR Blog - fed into the principle deliverable which is now available as a Handbook.