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Jeremy Hunt UK Minister of Culture has announced today plans to abolish a number of UK bodies and advisory panels funded by his department.

These include abolition of the UK Museums, Libraries and Archives Council by 2012 and the winding up of the UK legal deposit advisory panel.

Other changes under consideration include reviewing the role and remit of English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) have released the report Survey of Digital Preservation Practices in Canada, which presents the result of a survey the LAC commissioned in 2008 and completed in 2009.

The survey received 61 full responses from a variety of types of organisations: libraries, archives government departments/agencies, museums, research institutes, across a number of sectors: academic, governments and not-for profit. Although invitations were sent to several organizations in private industry, no responses were received from this sector.

The survey found that 72% of respondents are involved in some aspects related to digital preservation. Offsite storage was the most commonly cited practice in use, followed by activities that address the decay or obsolescence of storage media, including refreshing, bitstream copying and replication.

Digital preservation practices that address the understandability of the digital object (format/software obsolescence), such as migration or emulation are less widespread, even amongst those repositories that have a formal mandate to preserve. As well, only a few repositories are employing the types of  extensive metadata schemas needed for long-term preservation, such as PREMIS.

The majority of repositories in the survey are applying some basic integrity measurements (virus check, format verification, checksum verification, format validation) but other methods for establishing authenticity and trust in digital repositories, such as through the use of persistent identifiers and audit trails for digital objects are not well established.

There are also numerous other challenges for repositories beyond the most obvious technical ones, in particular around funding/staffing and expertise.

The report concludes digital preservation presents significant challenges; and given the growing volume and complexity of digital information it will continue to do so in the future. It suggests one way to assist Canadian organisations with these challenges would be to establish a central entity in Canada that can provide leadership in this area.

The US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has recently awarded 38 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants totalling $22,623,984.

Amongst the awards list I was struck by the following:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Champaign, IL : Project Title: “Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC)”

Award Amount: $988,543; Matching: $179,822

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have partnered to establish Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC). DCERC will develop a model, including a field experience in a data intensive scientific environment, for educating LIS master’s and doctoral students in data curation. It will implement a graduate research and education program to address the need for professionals with scientific expertise who can manage and curate large digital data collections. Six doctoral students will benefit from this project.

Purdue University – West Lafayette, IN: Project Title: “Understanding Curation through the use of Data Curation Profiles”

Award Amount: $187,242; Matching: $104,868

Purdue University will create a series of workshops to expand the expertise of academic librarians about data curation issues. The needs of researchers and data producers are changing radically because of the disruptive effects of technology on research and its dissemination. This continuing education program will teach an estimated 370 librarians to be more effective data curators.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – Chapel Hill, NC: Project Title: “Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 3 (WILIS 3): Sustaining the Career Tracking Model through Data sharing”

Award Amount: $298,385; Matching: $85,637

The School of Information and Library Science, the Institute on Aging, and the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will collaborate to document the process of data archiving and sharing. The major aims of the WILIS 3 project are to create publicly accessible de-identified datasets; to develop an interactive program-specific data system to enable library and information science programs to explore their own data and benchmark with other programs; and to produce a data archiving toolkit for use by other researchers.

And in UK/European Library and Information schools we have…….???

The European Archive are organising a Web Archiving Training Session on 14th and 15th of October 2010 in Paris.

The training will cover all aspects of Web Archiving for librarians, archivists as well as technicians in charge of web archiving. Special attention will be given to providing the necessary background on Internet technologies in general and Web publishing in particular to understand the media and requirements for its preservation.

Registration fees for the 2 days (including lunches and coffee breaks)are 750€ standard rate or 580€ for non-profit and governmental organisations.

The new UK coalition government has been making some interesting policy decisions around government data extending some of the work already underway under the previous Labour administration. For example see the prime minister’s Letter to Government departments on opening up data issued on Monday 31 May 2010.

The conservative party (majority partner in the coalition) technology manifesto is well worth looking over for anyone interested in data and IT policy in the UK and an indicator of what might still be coming out of the new government.

In addition, to plans to open up government data and spending information it refers to research by Rufus Pollock et al at Cambridge University on the economic value of open data, which estimated it will create an estimated £6 billion in additional value for the UK. This boost to British jobs will come from the synergies and positive spillover benefits that result from businesses and social entrepreneurs building new applications and services using previously locked-up government data.

It is fascinating to see how big an effect on UK government policy advocacy by the likes of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Free Our Data campaign has had. Of course it helps if similar initiatives are underway in the USA – see the Wired interview with the US government’s first-ever chief information officer, Vivek Kundra.

The New Zealand Government has announced the merger of Archives New Zealand, the National Library and the Department of Internal Affairs and new funding of £5.9 million pounds (NZ$12.6 million) to create a digital archive for New Zealand.

Announcing the new funding and the merger, the Minister responsible for all three agencies, Guy Hands believes they share natural synergies, a common focus on using digital technology, and making public information widely accessible to citizens through the internet. This move will allow expertise and resources to be pooled, while at the same time sharing back office costs. All savings generated by this project will be redirected into better frontline services for the public.

The New Zealand Government is also allocating £5.9 million pounds (NZ$12.6 million) of new money to Archives New Zealand and the National Library over the next four years to develop and implement a full-scale industrial-strength digital archive. The new archive will utilise Archive’s New Zealand’s existing infrastructure and build on functions developed for the National Library’s National Digital Heritage Archive.

A public announcement about the Government Digital Archive and was made at the Government Recordkeeping Forum held in Wellington on Tuesday 1 June.

The University of Bath and the UK Council for Electronic Business (UKCeB) are hosting the second Knowledge Management Marketplace (KMM10), taking place at the University of Bath on 17th June 2010. It focuses on knowledge management lessons learned for SMEs. There will also be a number of larger companies there such as Airbus, BAE, BMT, Korteq, IBM, etc.

KMM10 will be of interest to:

• Those who face issues related to knowledge management in their working day;
• Vendors, consultants and developers who can assist in addressing such issues;
• Researchers with interests in this area.

The marketplace is preceded by scene-setting keynotes, and followed by a panel session where issued raised throughout the day may be debated in a group setting.

Zoe Locke, Lead Technologist at the UK Technology Strategy Board has made an interesting post Impact of Data to their blog requesting any information on the economic impact of research data sharing. Extract as follows:

“I am currently in Manchester attending a JISC workshop on Managing Research Data…

Yesterday, there was an interesting keynote speech from the Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).  However, I noted that ‘Impact’ was the 3rd reason for why researchers should care about data curation.  I asked about the meaning of impact.  In the context of the talk, impact was about whether or not the research for which the data was used got published (and had an effect on the researcher’s career).  The DCC focuses on transferring knowledge on curation into and around the higher education sector so this seems like an appropriate definition of impact.  However, given the potential socio-economic impact of research and resultant data, not to mention the business opportunities it could create (though we don’t really know where or what these are, let alone how big they might be), I can’t help feeling that we need to widen the definition to stimulate greater sharing and exploitation of data.  If businesses could generate wealth or increase the quality of life with this data then surely it would be easier for anyone to justify footing the bill for curation…

Does anyone out there have any specific case studies of money being made or saved through the exploitation of research data (specifically that data generated in a different organisation to the one exploiting it)?”

You will need to register with the Connect Network to post a reply to Zoe direct but I am happy to forward any examples readers may add as comments to this posting on the Charles Beagrie blog.

I am pleased to announce that the final report for Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) is now available from the JISC website. This KRDS2 study report presents the results of a survey of available cost information, validation and further development of the KRDS activity cost model, and a new taxonomy to help assess benefits alongside costs.

KRDS2 has delivered the following:

• A survey of cost information for digital preservation, collating and making available 13 survey responses for different cost datasets;

• The KRDS activity model has been reviewed and its presentation and usability enhanced;

• Cost information for four organisations (the Archaeology Data Service; National Digital Archive of Datasets; UK Data Archive; and University of Oxford) has been analysed in depth and presented in case studies;

• A benefits framework has been produced and illustrated with two benefit case studies from the National Crystallography Service at Southampton University and the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex.

One of the key findings on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data was that the cost of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) is consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all the case studies in KRDS2. As an example the respective activity staff costs for the Archaeology Data Service are Access (c.31%), Outreach/Acquisition/Ingest (c.55%), Archiving (c.15%).This confirms and supports a preliminary finding in KRDS1.

A range of supplementary materials in support of this report have also been made available on the KRDS project website. This includes the ULCC Excel Cost Spreadsheet for the NDAD service together with a Guide to Interpreting and Using the NDAD Cost Spreadsheet. The NDAD Cost Spreadsheet has previously been used as an exercise in digital preservation training events and may be particularly useful in training covering digital preservation costs. The accompanying Guide provides guidance to those wishing to understand and experiment with the spreadsheet.

During the May  meeting of the National Science Board, National Science Foundation (NSF) officials announced a change in the implementation of the existing policy on sharing research data. In particular, on or around October, 2010, NSF is planning to require that all proposals include a data management plan in the form of a two-page supplementary document. The research community will be informed of the specifics of the anticipated changes and the agency’s expectations.

The changes are designed to address trends and needs in the modern era of data-driven science. Ed Seidel, acting assistant director for NSF’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences directorate acknowledged that each discipline has its own culture about data-sharing, and said that NSF wants to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to the issue. But for all disciplines, the data management plans will be subject to peer review, and the new approach will allow flexibility at the directorate and division levels to tailor implementation as appropriate.

Full details can be found in the NSF press release.

Data Management Plans are also required by a growing number of research funders in the UK. The Digital Curation Centre provides a useful overview of current UK funder requirements for data management and sharing plans and a Data Management Plan Content Checklist.