Hi,

I am a second year doctoral student in School of Information.

I have started to organize my thoughts about the research project. I appreciate a great deal for your any kind of COMMENTS.

What is the problem or issue? (in the theoretical debate, the world)
My research question is how traditional archive function could apply to e-communities in digital world. This is related to the hot topic in archival profession and research area that includes several sub-questions:

• Should archives archive websites?
• Why it is difficult to archive websites? (concerns of technology, policy, functionalities of archives)
• Why archival profession has not reached agreement on this issue and made significant progress to archive digital information?
• Is there enough software technology support (theoretically) that allows us to archive websites?
• Whether should archives preserve just the content of websites or all components as a whole?

Why is it important? (to researchers, to the world)
A lot of information has been only published digitally, which represents ephemeral kind of primary source that has the potential to reflect core aspects of contemporary culture. Archival profession is far behind to take the responsibility to preserve them for the future use as part of our social memory.

What have others done and why isn’t it enough?
The Department of Research, Cornell University Library, has done significant efforts in this area. For the past several years, they have devoted a large portion of their research activities to web preservation as a research area. Their VRC (Virtual Remote Control) project incorporates both the organizational and technological aspects needed aiming to successfully implement a digital preservation strategy. This project has created some models that need to be tested.


What is your general approach and why is it original and promising?
What are you going to do explicitly?
What will happen if you get results?
What does this mean? (in terms of answering the original problem)
Who cares? (which research communities, individuals, organizations…)
Where will you publish these results? Why?
What broader research agenda does the project fit into? In other words, if you continue further research in this area what will you be doing over the next 5 years?

XiaomuZhou