Way, way back, when I first found out about blogs and I was debating where to put the blog for my academic life, there was a debate about whether these blogs should go on institutional sites, or whether they should go on an external provider. WordPress wasn’t as big back then  – there were numerous options, and it wasn’t clear which ones were the best, which were likely to survive, which needed a bit of technical expertise and which were likely to start charging.

I’ve started several blogs since then, but I think this was my first. It took me all the way through my PhD and beyond. I have found it really helpful in reminding me of that process, reminding me of what it felt like to be a PhD student, reminding me of what was important to me at that time and what went wrong. It allows me to track how my research questions and my research overall evolved.

It’s now mainly a record of my PhD time, although I add to it infrequently. It has moved from being a read/write space to a read space. Not just for me – I point my doctoral students at it, and I have added posts on literature reviews and methodology so that I have advice I can point people to.

However, that brings me to the risks of institutional blogs. The university IT department makes the reasonable points that ‘Maintaining inactive blogs uses limited IT resources which are needed for more urgent work. They are also a security risk because any compromise is unlikely to be noticed.’

This one is currently scheduled for deletion because I haven’t posted to it for a couple of years. That’s not too bad but I noticed another of my OU blogs, which I authored with someone else, was recently deleted without warning. My co-author was the named lead, she has left the university, so no warning came and all that material is gone, including one blog post on viva questions that was very frequently read, referenced, and listened to.

Meanwhile, my external blogs on WordPress are there for me as sources of reference. They’ll survive once I leave the University.  This one, though, will eventually be gone. We hear a lot about the dangers of putting things online where they’ll be around for ever. We hear less about the dangers of putting things online where they could be swept away without notice. So much information, so many reference sources, swept away behind us.