As more of the “institutional record” gets pushed to the institutional website (‘brochureware’, prospectuses, course catalogs, annual reports, newsletters, etc) it raises interesting questions about who manages that institutional memory and about how it is managed.
I worked at the University of Bath for many years. My former colleague Brian Kelly has an interesting set of materials about the evolution of the university website since it was first set up.
This activity was carried out as part of a project looking at good preservation practices for institutional web managers.
In order to illustrate how an institution’s home page may change over a period of over 11 years the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine was used to view the first occurence of the University of Bath home page in every year from 1997 until 2007. (Note that in browsers which suppoprt Flash you can interact with the display and a more interactive access can be obtained if your install the PicLens plugin, although there are also links to the static images and an automated rolling display of the pages in the Internet Archive). [JISC-PoWR » Blog Archive » The History Of the University of Bath Home Page]
