Many Hands Make Light(er) Work: Collaborative Web Lifecycle Management
Alice Austin Sara Day Thomson
This poster will present the development of a collaborative Web Lifecycle Management programme at the University of Edinburgh. The University first embarked on web archiving through collecting community responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. This initiative provided a valuable opportunity to explore closer working with the UK Web Archive (UKWA) and to demonstrate the value of web archiving to the digital preservation of the institutional record. Further collaboration with the UKWA as part of an externally-funded project, Archive of Tomorrow, supported recruitment of a dedicated Web Archivist. This increased visibility and capacity allowed the University Archives to collaborate more meaningfully with the Website and Communications team who support web services for the institution’s many diverse communities. This poster will describe this collaboration and the shared roles and responsibilities for ensuring a sustainable and effective web service for users, from creation to long-term preservation. 

The institutional web estate (both at the main URL and thousands of off-domain URLs) encompasses a vast array of valuable resources – from press releases to research project websites. In the absence of established pathways to the Archives for digital records, web archiving provides a strategy to capture some record of almost every activity and function of the institution, all in the context of their presence on the Web. This Web Lifecycle programme partners closely the UKWA, using their infrastructure and guidance as a core strategy to support the preservation of most content in scope. This partnership allows the Archive to focus on quality assurance, troubleshooting, and metadata creation, improving the existing records in the UKWA and also supporting institutional requirements without maintaining a local system or contracting a third-party vendor.  

This poster will discuss the benefits of this collaborative approach to web archiving to meet institutional digital preservation requirements. It will also address some of the limitations and challenges, such as licencing and aligning information policies across a complex, devolved web estate. Ultimately, this poster will demonstrate how collaboration – internal and external – has catalysed progress in preserving one of the most diverse and inclusive records of activity at a large University – its web estate.
approaches to preservation from document to data