Well especially as expired domains are now often picked up by porn redirect sites to get the extra hits from old links and favourites, so you cant even rely on dead domains staying dead (and hence no new robots.txt to change the instructions) like in the past.

Then there’s the January 2007 issue of Ariadne, with relevant articles and conference reports.

That information is oriented to organizations (such as libraries) seeking to archive web pages. But you are going to have many of the problems they’ve already spent a lot of time analyzing.

If you’re only interested in “pretty good” persistence for someone else’s document, and you want to be able to point people to it with a URL, then webcite seems to be the way to go. Assuming the pages aren’t already being archived by a national library.

Beware.

Here is an example I just made:

http://www.webcitation.org/5MSlJEAAW

Of course there are issues. There are always issues.

2. Full-page capture programmes, like Zotero. Some other browser plugins can also do it.

Sure, in that sense it’s all dynamic. But since you mentioned the Flickr example with the Amazon example, I thought you were focusing more on the pages that are so dynamic that they almost certainly would not come up the same way as a result to a search by someone else using another machine logged in to another profile (or no login at all). I was surprised you’d equate Flickr to that sort of dynamic rendering, that’s all.

As for the Shakespeare garden, I’m living in Palo Alto this year so I can’t say. If it wasn’t so cold I’d say I’ll check it out next week when I’m back briefly, but I don’t think that going to happen this time around.

And it’s certainly true that archiving databases often isn’t simple.

I’m just saying that conceptually you’re probably better off with a copy of the database than with a bunch of reports based on this database.

On the other hand, preserving the data for machines to look at and do gymnastics on is flexible since you can theoretically present it or crunch the data again in various ways if you have all the original information somewhere. But creating new views of data isn’t always cheap or trivial. It becomes even more expensive and more complicated if the original rendering software isn’t preserved along with with the data (or if it becomes obsolete). At some point the cost of re-rendering from some specific data structure likely becomes higher than the known or suspected value of the data. Whereas a fixed-render in a standard format is likely to have pre-packaged software available to render it in a fixed and inflexible way, but at much lower cost longer into the future.

Likely you could both archive original data along with a fixed render and then you have some flexibility as well as lower cost for previewing/seeing the contents.

In reply to Peter (#38): Yikes. That’s a horrible story. That makes me consider that I should have better back-up practices for off site storage. (Or perhaps do twice-yearly DVD back ups of my USB hard drive back-ups to store off site). Not that it would ruin my life if I lost all my data on my home computer, but it would probably be more unpleasant than doing occasional off-site archiving.

Static documents are at least superficially indistinguishable from dynamic objects that are pretty different from them, making scope and synchrony questions essential for any internet archiving beyond saving a small amount of html locally. This leaves aside the unformalizable question of format/content, which is not one of HTML’s strengths.

On a local note—are the Shakespeare gardens behind Vogelback being kept up?

http://www.zotero.org/