Sustaining online research resources

Abstract

We have seen enormous growth in both the usage and creation of web resources in the last decade. Significant funds have been devoted to the creation of high qualityacademic web resources by both public and private sector organisation s. These have already benefited a large community of web users, researchers, students and teachers.In order to ensure continued access to this wealth of on-line resources, the web preservation community has already started making efforts to formulate and execute strategies aimed at collecting, processing and preserving today’s web resources so that they can be accessed with tomorrow’s technologies. This article reviews such initiatives, drawing a comparison between current web preservation practices and the ESRC-funded ReStore project, a sustainable web resources repository. Detailedconsideration is given to issues including authorship of web page content (intellectual property rights, copyright), metadata generation and preservation, the selection of web resources, and accessibility to hidden pages on a web server. We present a possible short-medium term preservation model aimed at sustaining on-line research method resources developed as part of ReStore. The article considers the potential for evolution from the current rather disparate web preservation approaches tostandardised “develop with a view to preservation” practices among web resource creators and the web preservation community