Vivimos tiempos raros en internet: parece que ahora es más fácil que se pierda algo que estaba allí de lo que imaginábamos al principio (Recordatorio: Yahoo will delete all Yahoo Groups content on December 14th por poner una reciente).

Por eso me gustó leer What Do You Do with 11,000 Blogs? Preserving, Archiving, and Maintaining UMW Blogs—A Case Study donde nos cuentan justamente el caso contrario: la Universidad de Mary Washington ha decidido dejar de proporcionar el servicio de alojamiento de blogs (en una política de no dar lo que se puede conseguir fácilmente de otra forma) y quieren cerrar ordenadamente y preservar lo que tenga sentido conservar.

What do you do with 11,000 blogs on a platform that is over a decade old? That is the question that the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) and the UMW Libraries are trying to answer.

Sobre todo, porque nada es gratis: tener esa instalación sin que nadie se ocupe mucho de ella es un problema.

And with a number of sites that haven’t been updated since the twenty-aughts, there are many that are poised to cause such problems: too many sites using too many outdated themes and plugins, leaving too many security vulnerabilities, and impacting the overall performance of the platform.

Pero quieren conservarlos:

... we at the University of Mary Washington are facing the unique challenge of archiving our early digital output, namely, UMW Blogs

Y hablamos de nada menos que 11.000 sitios:

It provided the campus with a WordPress installation that allowed any student, faculty, or staff member to get their own subdomain (e.g. mygreatblog.umwblogs.org) and WordPress site, administered by DTLT. Since then, the 600 blogs of 2007 has grown to over 11,000 blogs and 13,000 users as of 2018!

Como decíamos, antes pensábamos que lo que se ponía en la red era para siempre, pero eso no tiene porque ser cierto y, además, tampoco está claro que sea lo que esperamos hoy en día de la red.

And while there was the initial expectation that the sites would be left up on UMW Blogs forever, the changing nature of the web and our understanding of digital privacy and data ownership has evolved as well. We have an open, online platform featuring works by former faculty and students that are over a decade old, many of which are inaccessible to the original creator of the content to delete. Content they may no longer want on the web. How do we balance preservation and privacy?

Puede que haya gente que todavía quiera tener esa información, como estudianets que buscan empleo y quieren añadirla a su porfolio.

Former students, as well, may still be using content they have created on UMW Blogs in their job search. We want to ensure the UMW Blogs system works and that those important pieces of our institutional history and students’ intellectual property don’t become digital flotsam.

Y también:

Past members of DTLT (none of whom are still administering the platform) told users that their UMW Blogs sites would be hosted in perpetuity, but that presents a major data ownership and privacy issue. The internet is a different place than it was in 2007.

Y lo contrario: personas que desean que su contenido desaparezca y deje de
estar accesible.

We’ve also received a number of requests from alumni asking us to remove their blog from UMW Blogs, to remove a specific post they created on a faculty course site, or even to remove specific comments they left on a classmate’s blog as part of an assignment.

En estas cosas suele haber una tasa de abandono alta:

We identified over 5000 blogs on the platform that have not been updated since 2015 or earlier, are not administered by any current UMW community members, and have either not been visited at all in the last two years or have been visited less than 100 times in the entire time period for which we have analytics.

Así que se pusieron a examinar y encontraron algunos que debían preservar y mantener publicados (con cuidado para que no se convirtieran en un problema), y otros que podían ser eliminados.

In the end, we determined that of the 11,333 blogs on the UMW Blogs platform, 6012 of them were important to keep actively published on the web (including about 50 which would best serve the UMW Community by being frozen in time and preserved publicly before “bit rot” and broken plugins bring them down)

Bonita historia sobre los activos digitales, la preservación, el mantenimiento y la gestión de una infraestructura sana.

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