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A Whole Blog of History: About Collecting Blogs for the PANDORA Archive

Pandora: Australia's Web Archive

Do you collect blogs? This question is often asked about the PANDORA Archive. The interest may in part be due to the convenience of and widespread and ready use of the term; but also because of the fascination with this simple and immediate means of personal publishing, particularly given the free availability of blog hosting services.

But what exactly do we mean when we talk about blogs? Blogs can come in many forms but generally we understand the term to refer to a form of publishing on the web that is a personal expression of opinion or experience. This usually involves a dated, diary-like format of postings that build up something of a personal narrative of experience, opinion or interest and can provide a valuable historical perspective on issues, events, culture and opinion. This is often given additional context by the posting of reader comments and embedded and linked content, such as images and videos.

While blogs are particularly the provenance of the individual they may also be compendia of regular postings by multiple contributors. Since blogs provide a simple and immediate means of posting opinion pieces they are also used by professional journalists and commentators, as well as by amateurs and enthusiasts.

Issues and Challenges for Collecting Blogs

For the purpose of web archiving, blogs are basically no different from the most other websites that are selectively collected for inclusion in the PANDORA Archive. They are a website usually with a clear title and with linked and navigable content. As such, like other websites, they can be collected as discrete publications. However, the particular nature of blogs highlights some of the more complex challenges confronting web archiving. Like all web content included in the PANDORA Archive, permission—that is, licence under the Copyright Act 1968—must be obtained from the publisher (normally this is the creator of the blog) before collecting for the Archive can be undertaken.

Other challenges raised by collecting blogs include:

  • Identifying suitable blogs that come within the Library’s collecting objectives especially since blogs by Australians or about Australia do not necessarily or conveniently reside on the Australian (.au) web domain.
  • While discrete entities in some respects they are often included as parts of other sites, so decisions need to be made whether to collect them separately or as part of the larger site to which they belong.
  • They often include embedded, third-party content (for example YouTube videos) making them complex to collect from both a legal and technical perspective.
  • The content is often posted quickly which leads to the challenge of how to ensure timely capture.
  • Many blogs thrive on unedited and unfiltered (perhaps even ill-considered) content that can be easily ‘re-considered’ (removed or rectified) at the original site but may be problematic for the Archive which is committed to ensuring the integrity and the provenance of the content as originally collected.
  • While many blogs are focused clearly on a topic, many are wide reaching and discuss culture, issues and politics beyond that of specific relevance to Australia and so beyond the priority collecting mandate of the Library.
  • Blogs are often published under pseudonym or anonymity creating issues of provenance and context when being considered for selection for archiving.
  • Blogs often obtain value as part of a commentary or thread in the ‘blogosphere’ so that the value of content may not be in the discrete blog itself—which is what is collected for the archive—but in how it links to and relates to other blogs or online content. Capturing these ‘threads’ across the blogosphere is not yet possible for the PANDORA Archive.

What the Library Collects

Despite the many challenges, collecting a broad example of the personal expression of Australians through blogs remains an important focus for the web archiving team as they may be valuable historical documents for future researchers.

The Library began collecting blogs, rather tentatively at first, in 2001, with journalist Margo Kingston’s Webdiary, originally published as part of the Sydney Morning Herald online. This blog, now an independent publication including contributions by guest contributors, has been archived regularly and the changes it has undergone over the past decade can be followed in the Archive.

One index of Australian blogs, The Australian Index, lists more than 3500 blogs. However, the collection selected for the PANDORA Archive includes around 300 blogs and clearly represents only a small sample of Australian bolgging. The blogs are re-archived at intervals, making it possible to explore their history through the PANDORA Archive’s blog listing.

The blogs collected for PANDORA include those by many well-known commentators, such as Tim Blair, Ann Summers, John Quiggan, Stilgherrian, and Andrew Bartlett. The recent review of the use of Web 2.0 technologies in government led by Dr Nicholas Gruen for the Government 2.0 Taskforce recommended encouraging the use of interactive media such as blogs by government agencies to discuss publicly emerging thoughts and issues. Government blogging initiatives, such as the Government 2.0 Taskforce blog and the new AGIMO blog, are included in the PANDORA Archive.

But there is much more to explore in the ‘blogosphere’ and examples of all manner of blogs are included in the Archive which will provide a wider perspective on the history of blogging in Australia. For example you can explore the strange and fascinating world of footwear with the expert History of Shoes blog; read the experiences of a Sydney taxi driver in Cablog; relive Jessica Watson’s solo non-stop voyage around the world; delve into the scrapbook world of Loobylu; muse over the Diary of a Mad Cow; or have a peek at the short-lived blog by the Canberra photographic collective the Old Spool Betties.

Paul Koerbin
Web Archiving Section