Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, May 19, 2008

Preserving OA content

ReStore workshop, JISC Information Environment Team blog, May 15, 2008.

I attended a very interesting workshop for the ReStore project last week. The project is run by Southampton’s ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and is investigating the use of a repository to host and maintain orphan web resources.

The problem that the project is addressing is that very useful web resources are produced by research projects. However when the project funding stops the maintenance of the resources often stops. This means that the resources start to decay, broken links flourish and the usefulness of the resource deteriorates quickly.

ReStore aims to address this problem by accepting suitable resources after a review process and then hosting and curating the sites with a mixture of automated and manual processes.

The project ... aims to produce a prototype repository that curates a few web resources that have been produced by other ESRC projects.

The workshop was chiefly concerned with introducing the project and discussing some of the major issues such as technical challenges, IPR and sustainability. The presentations from the day can be downloaded from the project website. These include some mockups of the proposed system and an overview of the proposed review and curation process. ...