University websites can be categorised into two types:
- Current Information, such as sites that provide details about schools and courses.
- Long-Term Value, such as sites that offer research results or services, or tools for running datasets through novel algorithms.
The challenge with the latter type is they would often end up getting shut off when their technology went out of date and either broke, or was not worth the cost of updating to run on a more modern platform.
Our solution to this is to create the Southampton Web Archive. This takes a non-interactive copy of a website, then we usually redirect the old website to the archive location. Any interactive components where the website talks to the web server will stop working, but the actual content can be preserved for a very long time.
Chris wrote a blog post about this idea in 2019, and implemented the service a couple of years later.
We have archived over 100 websites so far, some dating back to the earliest days of the web. The oldest page is the university homepage from 1995.
What this can’t do is preserve interactive tools, like those that offer a data processing algorithm. If there is a demand for that, we do have some ideas…
Procedure
You file a ticket with ServiceLine mentioning the service WEB ARCHIVE, and the URL of the site you would like us to archive. We will only archive sites that you or the university is the copyright holder of.
We would then have a look at the site and suggest any minor housekeeping you may wish to do before we take the archive, such as making text in the appropriate tense and removing links to things that won’t work in a static archive.
Next we would take a trial copy and let you preview it carefully to check it is an adequate snapshot.
Once you are happy, we move that to the main web archive site, and redirect the old address to redirect to it.
If the address is .ac.uk, .soton.ac.uk or .southampton.ac.uk then that redirect will work indefinitely. Otherwise, if it’s a domain you’ve paid for, it’ll work until the payment runs out.