David Beck’s Blog

The articles from Digital History, the Ninch guide and by Dr. Rosenzweig all highlight the problems that one must consider if they want to see their website up and running 10, 20 or even 30 years from now. Unfortunately, one cannot look into the future and know with any certainty what kind of software/hardware the people of the future are going to be using. Keeping your website up and running requires a detailed plan that takes several criteria into question. File formats, software, code and other considerations must be made while you are developing your site in addition to the content and design qualities that most web builders are consumed with.

In order to better express how I intend to preserve my site, I will utilize the time tested format of the question and answer.

WHAT IS THE LIFE CYCLE OF MY SITE?
Conceivably, my site could be up forever. I’m sure somewhere in the world, students will always be learning about the fall of Rome. However, realistically my site probably has a shelf life of about 5-7 years. After that, it could probably die a slow death or it would need major changes to survive. The reason I say this is because the web is constantly changing. Websites that looked cool and innovative 7 years ago, now look simplistic and uninteresting. I recall when I was first surfing the internet in 1995 how text heavy most of the sites were. Today, text heavy sites are boring and lose their users quickly if they aren’t prepared to read and scroll.

Originally I plan to have a committee that will oversee the website. They will meet every two years to discuss how the websites looks, changes that need to be made and any special features that they would like to add. For example, adding a section on how aspects of United States foreign policy may parallel with those of Rome during its two centuries of decline may be interesting especially to students from the United States, my target audience. Perhaps if this committee is vigilant my website could survive for 10-15 years instead.

WHAT CHANGES WOULD I MAKE?
I would like to use videos and animation to visualize for the students how the last days of Rome would have been. Clearly this type of technology is continually getting better and better. Copyright laws aside, I’m sure the process of embedding videos within the site and using computer animation to enhance certain aspects of the site will become better and easier to use and run on all computers. That is why having a full-time webmaster makes sense for me and would prevent the site from becoming stale.

WHAT IF YOU GET NO MONEY TO CREATE YOUR SITE?
Aside from a few pictures, my site would then be forced to be very text heavy with no videos or animation. While I would keep the text short and to the point, the visual elements of the site would have to be forgotten. It would make the site less valuable to students, but require practically no upkeep.

HOW WILL YOU PRESERVE YOUR WEBSITE FOR THE FUTURE?
I envision my site being hosted by Spotsylvania County Schools server. There will be a link from the Thornburg Middle School website as well. I think collaborating with a museum is a terrific idea and may extend the life of a website. Due to the message board I would like to have on my site, I will have to use a storage device that can handle multimedia, but that can also be periodically updated in case of problems. The message board will require incremental backups. Perhaps backing up to a magnetic tape is the way to go. How expensive is that? The Ninch guide seems to favor CDs as a way to store information. I don’t think my website is so important that I need to keep a second copy encased in special gas and sent to the salt mine of Utah for optimal preservation. However, I do think copies of my site should be held in a off-site location. These copies can be refreshed during the time the committee convenes to see what changes need to be made to the website.

Those are a few considerations that I thinking about in terms of preservation. I am hoping that we can flesh out a few of the issues in class as some of the reading concerning preservation was a bit complex.