Ephemerality and the web

So there I am, just about ready to present my digital repository for Metadata class...well, scratch that, I had been done with my presentation materials for a bit of time in advance, but like with everything, I tweak, edit, revise and redo right up til the end. As I surf back over to Northwestern University's World War II Poster Collection, my chosen repository, I am met with a startling discovery...it's GONE! Ok, not gone completely, but it would appear that after 17 years, the decision was made to finally migrate the old repository over to a new software platform, wiping out quite a bit of the existing metadata from the looks of it, and instantly negating any of the information I was prepared to present on the collection. Surely I am not the first student this has happened to, and we have all certainly encountered the ephemeral nature of content on the web at some point, with favorite sites there one moment and gone forever just a few days later.

It is inevitable that any online content meant to last for an extended period of time (is that an oxymoron?) will undergo changes and transitions at some point in its life cycle. Guessing the specific reasons for such changes is a fairly interesting exercise, and is definitely informed by a lot of what I learned during this semester. For the World War II Poster Collection, the interface is now more modern, the navigation options more intuitive, and the overall aesthetic is definitely of a higher quality. That's certainly of benefit to the site just on visual and presentation improvements. Beyond that, there are undoubtedly changes "under the hood" that have made a change in software and style warranted. How does the site handle linked data, and is it now designed to be integrated with other NWU online collections? What types of elements or features are now usable, or desired, that may not have been possible to represent in the old software? Will these changes allow the collection to be harvested by sites such as DPLA? Will the metadata records still be converted from their original MARC format, or will they be built as original records from the ground up? What schema will it follow? What content standards will it use? As the collection's migration still seems in its infant stages, it will be interesting to follow the progression of how its metadata records are built, how items will be grouped, structured, and searched for, and what extra features (if any) will be implemented. 

This whole experience has definitely been an educational one for me. While my professor can attest to my panic upon first realizing my repository had been reborn, there is definitely a lesson to be learned in terms of the need to be flexible, adaptable, and open to changes in the world of metadata, as well as the online environment as a whole. That may seem like an obvious characteristic to some, but I think we sometimes take for granted the nature of the information we pull from the web on a daily basis, and the ability to continue doing so day after day. At the least, I got a really great glimpse at a pretty interesting digital collection of World War II-related posters and some of the technical aspects related to its presentation and use of metadata, and now I get to see the whole process started anew.