Colleges and universities have long recognized the need to archive and maintain the papers that constitute their institutional histories. In this presentation, we argue for similar protocols for preserving the digital materials produced through the open pedagogical practice of student web domains as well as chronicle a library course designed to do just that.
Colleges and universities have long recognized the need to archive and maintain the papers that constitute their institutional histories. In this presentation, we argue for similar protocols for preserving the digital materials produced through the open pedagogical practice of student web domains as well as chronicle a library course designed to do just that.
As we move into a pedagogical age where students are becoming knowledge creators rather than consumers, institutions are raising questions on how to highlight and preserve these projects beyond the tenure of both the student and/or the technology so that they are accessible to all everywhere.
The University of Oklahoma has been running a Domain of One’s Own pilot project for more than 2.5 years and over 3,500 domain users. This project has resulted in thousands of spaces, which have manifested through blogs, research sites, and portfolios, are a product of both academic and personal work. With the ebb and flow of users entering and leaving the institution this brings into question what and how to properly archive the public content that has been generated.
As such, institutions broach this topic from a multitude of perspectives. How do we make sure the work our community engages in lives on for future generations? How do we tell the historical narrative of the institution, particular it is related to pedagogy? What did it mean to be a knowledge creator in relation to the World Wide Web? How do we value spaces as both highly individual and as a broader collective of academic work?
This talk will highlight how the OU has conceptualized building infrastructure to preserve this practices of open pedagogy through a self-hosted Internet Wayback Machine experience; allowing users to preserve, interact with, and research the historical records of open pedagogy. As it’s been said, “The history of the WWW is not a singular history, but a dispersed collection of eclectic histories and stories – many that have nothing to do with anybody else’s.”
In particular, we will discuss how a graduate-level Library and Information Sciences archiving course has assisted in helping OU lay the groundwork for the infrastructure as well as construct general guidelines on how to ethically approach digital archiving of institutional knowledge.
From a technical standpoint, we’ll demonstrate how the tools function and the plan to continue to build an archive of our own.