I was able to put my Preservation Plan into action by uploading a Pottermore Collection to the Internet Archive in addition to saving the collection on my laptop. Here’s a brief recap of my Preservation Plan:
- Capture this YouTube video that announced the launch of Pottermore in 2011, saved by the youtube-dl downloader.
- Archive the Pottermore Wikia, using their own archiving tools to download the xml files.
- Download the images from the Pottermore Wikia separately, since the xml files don’t include them. This was going to involve the command line method, or if that didn’t work, to curate a selection of images from the collection.
- Save this Pottermore entry from the Harry Potter Wikia, which details the description and history of the site.
- Save Let’s Play videos that can be found on YouTube to capture the interactivity of Pottermore, using the youtube-dl downloader.
I’ve officially uploaded what I’ve collected so far to the Internet Archive, check it out here: https://archive.org/details/Pottermore.
The first file I included was a PDF of the Pottermore entry from the Harry Potter Wikia. This entry gives a full description and history of Pottermore. I concluded that since it was only one entry, and the text is what matters more than anything else, a PDF would suffice. The next folder includes a selection of images from the Pottermore Wikia. This is what I was really happy about, since this is a feature that a lot of people enjoyed from the first Pottermore that isn’t as present in the newer version. Since I couldn’t figure out that command line method that I had written about in my Preservation Intent Statement, which was supposed to capture all of the images from a Wiki, I had to go through one by one on the Pottermore Wikia image directory and download them. Since there are 51 pages of images, with each page containing at least 40 images, I will be uploading one page’s worth of images at a time (as of this post, I have two pages’ worth of images uploaded to the Internet Archive). I save all of the images in their original format, which are either .jpg or .png files. The final folder contains the XML files of the Harry Potter Wikia, which I had downloaded using the tools provided by the Wikia itself.
What I did not upload to the Internet Archive (due to copyright uncertainties) but have saved to my Pottermore folder on my computer are the videos. I used the youtube-dl downloader to save the Pottermore launch video from 2011 as well as some Let’s Play videos to capture the experience of playing Pottermore. All of the videos were saved in .mp4 format.
Below is a screenshot of the collection I have on my computer:
I arranged the folders according to the different aspects of Pottermore that were saved. The first folder contains the history of Pottermore, which includes the Harry Potter Wikia entry. The second folder involves the Let’s Play videos, which capture the experience of playing Pottermore. The next folder contains the Pottermore images, which are either in .jpg or .png format. Some of the images are labeled either with descriptions, usually the names of the characters in the images (for example, “Hokey” or “Hooch”). However, most of the images are named after their location within Pottermore. For example, B1C11M1 = Book 1 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone), Chapter 11 (“Quidditch”), Moment 1 (“Charms Homework”). This will help orient the viewer as to the order of images within Pottermore. The next folder is Pottermore Launch, which includes the 2011 YouTube video that announced the coming of Pottermore. The final folder contains the Pottermore Wikia pages in xml format.
What this collection really comes down to is trying to capture the essential elements of a website that, for our present purposes, no longer exists. I am hoping that with the xml files of the wiki, the images that provided the interactive layers, and the let’s play videos that show how the game was played, that this goal was accomplished.