In 2013, the http://middleware.internet2.edu and http://security.internet2.edu servers, which held work by numerous Internet2 and InCommon working groups concerning middleware and security issues, were decommissioned as part of an upgrade of Internet2's web content management infrastructure. While some documents were identified for preservation as part of the upgrade, many were discovered to have been an important part of Internet2's history only after the old servers were decommissioned. As a result, David Walker worked under contract to Internet2 to "rescue" that history and place it in the Trust and Identity Document Repository. This work occurred between 2015 and 2017.
Identifying the legacy documents that should be preserved in Trust and Identity's document repository has largely been an ad hoc process, but there have been guiding principles. The primary source of legacy documents has been a tar files containing the files that comprised the http://middleware.internet2.edu and http://security.internet2.edu servers shortly before they were decommissioned, but several documents have also been retrieved from other sources, such as sites that had distributed documents developed in partnership with Internet2, or even authors' personal laptops.
The primary selection criteria for a legacy document is that it appears to be useful for the Trust and Identity community in the future, as gauged by
- its direct usefulness to current and planned Trust and Identity activities
- the degree to which its content provides historical foundation for Trust and Identity's current state
- an explicit request from the community
It is recognized that these measures will not identify all documents that may be found to be needed in the future, so the http://middleware.internet2.edu server's tar file has been preserved at https://internet2.box.com/s/j2rf1q98zoj0xs98kfqxdn8fnedo3p27 for future digital archaeologists.
Where possible, the original files were preserved. When the original files were not in one of the repository's approved formats, however, the files were converted using tools like LibreOffice and pdftotext. A Subject Tag of "middlewarerescue" was added to the metadata page for each rescued document to facilitate the generation of automatic indexes, such as Index of Documents Rescued from Early Middleware and Security Activities.
A Special Note about the Annual IDTrust Workshop Materials
The agenda, papers, presentations, etc. from the ten IDTrust and PKI R&D Workshops are stored in the repository as large combined PDF files, one per workshop. These combined PDF files were created from the individual materials linked from the middleware server for each year. Materials that were not already PDF files were converted using LibreOffice, and then all materials were concatenated in their original order using the Linux pdfunite utility. The text files were created with the pdftotext utility using the -layout option.
Adding to the Collection
If you know of other legacy documents that should be included in this collection (including individual materials from the IDTrust workshops), please contact David Walker <dwalker@internet2.edu>.