It's funny; I've been well aware of groups such as the internet archive doing this work, but I hadn't thought much about how it was being done. It seems like there are two sides/challenges to this depending on what you want to preserve.
Case 1: You want to preserve what the user sees. To me this is more straightforward. You use tools such as some of those linked to already to capture the generated client-side web code and archive it. In the case of websites which may be using web code which, for whatever reason, might not be expected to future-scale in a compatible way (I'm thinking about some of the crazy-proprietary tags and properties that sometimes pop up), an era-appropriate web-browser, along with dependencies, could be kept in the archive space (maybe that's silly overkill, but it makes sense to me). Case 2: You want to preserve the server-side scripting. This is both harder and just as straight-forward depending on how concerned you are with accessibility. Warehousing old code so you can look at the files is easy. If you still want the server-side scripts to run you'll need to keep them in some kind of virtual machine or virtual environment that's "locked in time". Anything like that would, of course, need to be isolated from the rest of a network and from the internet at large. I'm not sure why you'd want to do this, except to preserve an particular server-side approach for posterity, but then again museums have been known to do similar things. Wasn't it the British National Museum which built it's own copy of Babbage's never-completed Difference Engine from his own blueprints? You can learn a lot by seeing what happens when a piece of code runs instead of just making an educated guess. Best regards, Jason Bengtson, MLIS, MA Head of Library Computing and Information Systems Assistant Professor, Graduate College Department of Health Sciences Library and Information Management University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center 405-271-2285, opt. 5 405-271-3297 (fax) [email protected] http://library.ouhsc.edu www.jasonbengtson.com NOTICE: This e-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise exempt from disclosure. If the reader of this e-mail is not the intended recipient or the employee or agent responsible for delivering the message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify us by replying to the original message at the listed email address. Thank You. On Mar 20, 2014, at 7:42 AM, Joanne Paterson <[email protected]> wrote: > http://netpreserve.org
