Sciblogs — the end of an era
The blogging platform for New Zealand science communicators called Sciblogs has been decommissioned. All of the content has been safely stored in the National Library Web Archive for researchers to find and use.
Archiving Sciblogs platform
Sciblogs, the blogging platform created for New Zealand science communicators has closed down. However, all is not lost! The National Library of New Zealand has archived a copy of the site.
The homepage of Sciblogs as it appeared on 22 June 2022. Archived by the National Library of New Zealand.
The history of Sciblogs
Sciblogs began in 2009 when science blogging was in its heyday overseas, but there were few opportunities for New Zealand science bloggers to communicate with a New Zealand audience. Sciblogs was the initiative of the Science Media Centre which wanted to offer scientists the opportunity to blog about science-related issues affecting society.
It continued until June 2022, but as editor Dr Sarah-Jane O’Connor mentioned in her blog post Bidding farewell to Sciblogs, with the rise of social media and other media outlets like The Conversation, Newsroom, and The Spinoff, the number of bloggers contributing to the site dwindled over the years.
Sciblogs founder Peter Griffin also talks about the history of Sciblogs, and the rise of social media in his blog post Sciblogs gave scientists a platform before social media took over.
Preserving Sciblogs web content
The Library’s primary web harvesting tool, the Web Curator Tool, was launched back in 2007. We had limited bandwidth back then, and we could only run 16 consecutive web harvests at the time, so when Sciblogs was launched in 2009 we were unable to harvest the entire platform.
We did select some of the blogs for individual capture, including those that were being updated more frequently and those that fell within our collecting scope at the time. We also collected blogs that were being decommissioned and removed from the platform.
A sample of a few of the many blogs on the platform that we have archived separately are listed below:
Food-stuff by Amanda Johnson — a New Zealand Registered Dietitian and Registered Nutritionist
Griffins Gadgets by Peter Griffin — founding manager of the Science Media Centre and co-founder of Sciblogs.
Hot Topic by Gareth Renowden — a journalist who blogged about climate change.
Science-life by Rebecca McLeod — a marine ecologist.
When Dacia Herbulock, Director of the Science Media Centre told us that Sciblogs was closing down, we wanted to ensure all 41 blogs that were still on the platform were captured in one crawl.
Food-stuff by Amanda Johnson. National Library Catalogue record. National Library of New Zealand.
Challenges in capturing the site
Our web engineer ran the crawl for us because there was some complexity in capturing the site. It required picking up missing pages in an additional crawl and filtering out pages that had already been captured.
That’s not as easy as it sounds!
It involved experimenting with crawl parameters – what to include/exclude to ensure the entirety of the site was captured and capturing the pagination in the patch crawls so every blog could be navigated to in the web viewer.
The Sciblogs blogroll lists 41 blogs that we have captured, but there are other blogs from the site that we’ve captured in the past that are not on that list. These have been archived separately. One was A Measure of Science by Shaun Hendy, who has become well-known for his commentary during the COVID-19 pandemic. We started collecting his blog in 2012, but the content we collected goes right back to 2009. There you’ll find Hendy reporting on some of the results of complex systems theory applied to science innovation.
The homepage for Shaun Hendy's 'A measure of science' blog, as seen in 2009. Link to the archived copy of ‘A measure of science’.
COVID-19 bloggers
Several of the scientists have become household names during the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably Dr Siouxsie Wiles.
In her blog Infectious Thoughts, she posted about the one-year anniversary of the animation ‘Flatten the Curve’ that appeared in the Spinoff and went viral.
Dr Siouxsie Wiles' blog Infectious Thoughts in which she posted about the one year anniversary of the animation “Flatten the Curve” that appeared in the Spinoff and went viral.
And then there are blogs by Dr Michelle Dickenson aka Nano Girl, Professor Michael Baker, contributor to the Public Health Expert blog, and Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris, author of Diplomatic Immunity.
Searching for content in the archived copy of Sciblogs
When we archive a website from the Internet it becomes a ‘static’ copy, which means we capture the HTML pages and images, but not the search functionality that a live website might have had.
The copy is preserved in the National Digital Heritage Archive and delivered through a web viewer. This currently means you will need to tab through pages to look for content.
We know that’s not great when you want to search for content through hundreds of posts, and we have a goal to make websites like these full-text searchable and provide other means of access as well.
The important thing right now is that the website is preserved so that when the site is taken down, you will still have access to the content via the archived copy.
Finding a specific blogpost
If you want to find a specific post in the Sciblogs archive and you have the URL of the post, this is how you find it in the archive.
Start with this base URL followed by the URL for the specific blog post:
https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/webarchive/20220622093355/ [add URL here]
As an example, here is the URL for Sarah-Jane O'Connor's post farewelling Sciblogs:
https://ndhadeliver.natlib.govt.nz/webarchive/20220622093355/https:/sciblogs.co.nz/guestwork/2022/06/17/bidding-farewell-to-sciblogs/
A general search for ‘sciblogs’ in the National Library catalogue will deliver the records for all the blogs that have been archived separately, as well as the main Sciblogs archive.
Available to researchers now and in the future
I’ve enjoyed following Sciblogs over the years. It’s nice to know that these blogs will still be available to researchers in the future, whether they are studying science or the history of the internet!
View the archived copy of Sciblogs
For more information about what is in the New Zealand Web Archive, take a look at our collections page.