Website Sustainability

Tim Berners-Lee makes some interesting comments in the video below about public funded project data being useful and accessible to others. The Semantic Web of Data Tim Berners-Lee | Real Earnings On : 'via Blog this'

A new article has been published in  Ariadne  on the work done at the University of Northampton on web sustainability. Turner S (2012) . "Case Studies in Web Sustainability".  November 2012 ,  Ariadne  Issue 70  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/turner   ISSN: 1361-3200 At the moment organisations often make significant investments in producing Web-based material, often funded through public money, for example from JISC. But what happens when some of those organisations are closed or there  is no longer any money or resources to host the site? We are seeing cuts in funding or changes in governmental policy, which is resulting in the closure of some of these organisations. What happens to those Web resources when the organisations are no longer in existence? Public money has often been used to develop these resources - from that perspective it would be a shame to lose them. Moreover, the resources might be needed or someone may ...

Should all the web resources produced during a publicly funded project be required to store them sustainably? By sustainably I mean that: Hosting option should keep the resource on-line after the money for the project or organisation is no longer available; Ownership the resources can be transferred easily; Content should be relatively easily transferred either to other sites or archived in an accessible way. I think the answer is yes and possibly it should be part of the funding criteria. We are talking about using a scarce resource public money, to get the best value for that money if a resource has been developed using that money it should be available for those who paid for it. If a resource was worth investing in, why wouldn't it be worth something later. The nature of the resource may change with time, possible going from a resource about current activity to be a resource of historic interest. A JISC funded project " Sustaining "At Risk" On...

Some of the work from this web sustainability project has been summarised in a recent blog entry at:  http://blogs.northampton.ac.uk/expertsatnorthampton/2011/09/27/web-sustainability-its-gone/ The importance of sustainability of publicly funded web resources is considered. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at: http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c please feel free to fill it in or http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=cec22f0a-e467-4c15-a319-74d96bb8ed9d