Our latest DART podcast contains a compelling and fascinating interview with Dr Marta Teperek, the Research Data Facilitator at Cambridge University Library’s Research Operations Office. She attended our May Web Archiving 101 Course (featuring guest speakers Dr Peter Webster and Sara Day Thomson) and seemed to derive a lot of benefit from it. She even published a very positive blog post on the subject.
We thought it would be nice to hear her expand on her views. In the interview that follows, she describes a vibrant scene at Cambridge where websites and blogs – and indeed many other forms of Web 2.0, social media, and interactive web content – have a central role to play in the research data continuum. Far from being a “nice to have” add-on to a researcher’s work, a website can be an evidence base, an interactive communication and feedback tool, a sharing platform, a project management tool, and more besides. Marta confidently describes web content and social media output as part of research documentation and that it should be seen as “our lab book of modern times”.
The role of web archiving in research
Marta has no doubt that web archiving plays a crucial role and websites should be preserved and made accessible for a long period of time as a core part of a researcher’s output; they should do this in the name of accessibility, preserving an evidence base, keeping a record of their work, sharing outputs, and allowing future reuse; but also as part of meeting the EPSRC funder requirements for research data preservation. Reuse, for Cambridge, includes not only the HFE and academic sector, but external agencies and organisations; for instance, “a start-up company may think that your dataset is the crucial dataset that they need to be able to move forward.”
Further, she envisions an integrated archive of digital content, where website archives can be queried and searched alongside datasets, publications, and other documents in the data repository; they are a valid part of the overall research outputs. The importance of maintaining web links, when used as scholarly citations or references, is especially important in this context.
Since she’s frequently asked difficult questions by researchers about how to archive their websites and blogs, Marta attended our May 101 workshop. She found it “really provided very comprehensive answers to all these questions”. She liked the format of our focussed, short talks on a certain subject with key highlighted take-home messages.
Book your place on our upcoming web archiving 101 course
Web archiving is one of many topics which was taught briefly on the Digital Preservation Training Programme, but has now grown into a topic worthy of its own dedicated 101 Event. Web Archiving 101 is a one-day course where you can learn the basics of web archiving. Who is doing it? Why should we do it? Who uses web archives, and why? What tools can we use to do it? Can we get someone else to do it for us? How do we make selections? What about records management and business needs? Can we capture social media? These subjects and more will be taught by our team of web archiving experts.
Listen to our web archiving and research data interview below
The post DART Podcast – web archiving and research data appeared first on DART Blog.