On a different note, it seems that, overall, Web 2.0 has in fact made digital preservationists out of everyone. We’re creating our own little digital archives with blogging, Flickr, del.icio.us, Ning, etc. Web 2.0 might be making it harder for “traditional” (for lack of a better word) archivists and preservationists, but it’s made it easier for enthusiasts and amateurs to become preservationists. And, knowing your interests in amateurization, enthusiasts, and tinkering, I’m curious what your thoughts are about this. I think all this might threaten digital archives like the September 11 Archive or the Internet Archive, but I think it might in fact increase the number of digital preservationists in practice.

Thus my point; as the actual user experience of digital content is increasingly mediated by web apps run within the browser, preservationists are going to have to move from archiving documents (which we know how to do well) to archiving applications, as well as the underlying data streams that power them.

In short – I have a flickr stream. I can access and preserve those images and captions very easily (Jeremy’s point r.e. Web 2.0). What’s much harder is to preserve them as they appear in a sidebar on my blog (where most people might see them) if they’re dynamically put there by an AJAX call after the page loads. For the purposes of a web crawler (still the state of the art when you’re talking about archiving, be it Internet archive or the Library of Congress), that sidebar would be an imprnetrable black box.

“In a sense, the whole point of Web 2.0 is to make it harder to archive and preserve knowledge.”

To me, the whole point of of Web 2.0 apps is that data is *freer* than it has previously been. Instead of forcing people to visit a website to peruse their own data, Web 2.0 apps offer APIs that allow third party developers to create other tools for viewing the same data.

To my mind, that freedom of data movement is what defines the Web 2.0 mindset. Personally, I don’t even visit sites like Flickr, del.iciou.us or Upcoming all that often, even though I’m constantly adding to the store of my data they hold. I add and retrieve my content using desktop apps or more lightweight websites.

The ability to easily archive and retrieve my own content is the most important factor in my mind when it comes to choosing a centralised hosted service. As I understand it (and I may well be wrong here), that ease of access to my own content is the defining element of Web 2.0.

How the website itself chooses to present the stored data — through Ajax, Flash, or whatever — is largely irrelevant. That is, it’s very relevant for the current, short-term user experience but it’s irrelevant for the purposes of archiving and storage.

You say:

“As websites move from being documents to being applications, their actual content is wrapped up in increasingly difficult-to-penetrate layers of code, both client-side (which is at least capturable by webcrawlers) and server-side (which is impossible to archive without effort on the part of the site creator).”

But if the site creator hasn’t provided easy access to the user’s content (through an open API) then that application is, de facto, not Web 2.0.

For more info, particularly from a user’s point of view, try this ten-page PDF… eye-opening:
“PDFs as a Standard for Archiving”
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/pdfarchiving.pdf

For web pages, it’s easy to capture a full presentation with linked files into a single static PDF for archiving. It’s still good to keep the info live in its original database, as well as the templates into which that data flows, but for long-term storage of a website as it was viewed at the time, ISO 19005 can handle this problem.

jd/adobe