JISC

Overview

Academic blogs are abundant in HE institutions in the UK but are often excluded from institutional records, archives, and information management activities. This project will develop an innovative digital archiving application to facilitate integration of institutional blog outputs into an overall records and information management strategy, based on existing open source blogging software (WordPress). It will use and extend existing aggregating functionality to dynamically harvest blog content using RSS/Atom (and blog APIs where appropriate), and store and manage them using a standard blog database, extending metadata schemas as necessary.The result will be a lightweight, off-the-shelf blog archiving tool, that is easy to install and manage, intended to meet the needs of organisations and projects, typically but not exclusively in HE, wishing to preserve a record of blogging activities by multiple individuals or groups using diverse blogging tools, platforms and hosts. The project will demonstrate the use of the system using existing blogs of UKOLN, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), and Lincoln University.