Approaches to archiving professional blogs hosted in the cloud

Early adopters of blogs will have made use of externally-hosted blog platforms, such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com, due, perhaps, to the lack of a blogging infrastructure within the institution or concerns regarding restrictive terms and conditions covering use of such services. There will be cases in which such blogs are now well-established and contain useful information not only for current readership but also as a resource which may be valuable for future generations. The need to preserve content which is held on such third-party services (“the Cloud’) provides a set of new challenges which are likely to be distinct from the management of content hosted within the institution, for which institutional policies should address issues such as ownership and scope of content. Such challenges include technical issues, such as the approaches used to gather the content and the formats to be used and policy issues related to ownership, scope and legal issues. This paper describes the approaches taken in UKOLN, an applied research department based at the University of Bath, to the preservation of blogs used in the organisation. The paper covers the technical approaches and policy issues associated with the curation of blogs a number of different types of blogs: blogs used by members of staff in the department; blogs used to support project activities and blogs used to support events.