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Ever since a Digital Lives seminar at the British Library earlier this year previewed some of the work, I’ve been looking forward to the publication of this CLIR report on digital forensics and the cultural heritage.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has now published the report, Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriela Redwine.

Digital forensics was once specialised to fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defence, but because most records today are born digital, libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media-and sometimes entire computers-as part of their acquisition of “papers.” Staff at these institutions face challenges such as accessing and preserving legacy formats, recovering data, ensuring authenticity, and maintaining trust. The methods and tools that forensics experts have developed can be useful in meeting these challenges. For example, the same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect’s hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession.

The report introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence.

Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections is now available electronically at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub149abst.html. Print copies will be available in January for ordering through CLIR’s Web site, for $25 per copy plus shipping and handling.

I’ve downloaded the electronic edition but have yet to read it (that’s part of  my Xmas reading sorted) but if the seminar is anything to go by it will be a great contribution to the emerging field on personal digital collections and the curation of digital heritage.

I am pleased to announce the release of a new User Guide from the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) project on the costs and benefits of digital preservation of research data. This is the second and final work of synthesis from the project. The User Guide is available for download as a PDF from here.

The KRDS User Guide has been developed to support easier assimilation of the combined work of the KRDS1 and KRDS2 projects by those wishing to implement the tools or key findings.

KRDS is a cost framework that can be used to develop and apply local cost models for research data management and long-term preservation. In addition, it includes a Benefits Taxonomy and discussion of benefits which provides a valuable starting point and framework for assessing the impact and benefits of research data management and preservation activities. Finally, KRDS has been a significant research project establishing many key “rules of thumb” for digital preservation costs and approaches to sustaining digital research data. Even those who do not wish to or cannot allocate the resources to develop local models based on KRDS are likely to benefit from its key findings and exemplars, covered in later sections of the Guide.

The Use Guide consists of 39 A4 pages with 15 illustrations (many created specifically for this Guide) and covers the following major areas:

The KRDS Costs Framework;

A Brief “How To” Guide For Life-Cycle Cost Analysis;

KRDS Benefits Analysis;

KRDS Case Studies, Costs Survey, and Factsheet;

Future Development of KRDS.

We hope the User Guide will be of value to the digital preservation and research data communities. In addition to the User Guide we have created the new KRDS webpage which provides a single point of access for the key outputs of both the KRDS1 and KRDS2 projects (including the two recent works of synthesis the KRDS User Guide and the KRDS Factsheet).

The Keeping Research Data Safe studies have been conducted by a partnership of the following institutions: Charles Beagrie Ltd, OCLC Research, the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service, the University of London Computer Centre, and the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Oxford and Southampton. The creation of the Guide has been funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme.

We welcome feedback from users of the Guide which will help enhance and update future editions.

The JISCMail Digital Preservation list passes a significant milestone this month – its 10th birthday and there is a lead item on the anniversary in the November issue of the JISCMail Newsletter . Today there are some 1300 subscribers in over 30 countries.

The first message was posted on 13th November 2000 and there have been many thousands of postings since then. Just for fun some randomly selected events from the archives of the last 10 years:

• 2000 In December 2000, US Congress appropriated $100 million for NDIIPP.
• 2002 In February of 2002 a newly formed Digital Preservation Coalition in the United Kingdom addressed the House of Commons about the importance of considering long term digital preservation.
• 2004 The Digital Curation Centre had its public launch in November 2004.
• 2005 First Digital Preservation Award presented at the British Museum on 22 November 2005.
• 2006 In August 2006, the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation.
• 2008 The Guardian Newspaper on Tuesday 30th September devoted an editorial “In praise of…preserving digital memories” to digital preservation and the iPRES 2008 conference in London.

The Report from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) institutional pilots of impact assessment were published recently by HEFCE.

There was also some discussion in Times Higher with articles  on the general implications and the other on specific implications for the humanities.

Having read the report, I think the REF Impact assessment is highly relevant and important for many UK research data projects and probably of interest to others internationally.  For me the main points of interest were:

• The introduction of the Impact component of REF can support the business case for research data infrastructure as that infrastructure could help institutions promote/record impact;
• The REF timeline 2011-2014;

• The pilot exercise affirmed the use of case studies as the best approach for REF;
• Use of “reach” and “significance” to assess impact in REF and the initial draft list of impact indicators in Appendix G (draft ‘common menu’ of impact indicators) from the REF draft guidelines;
• The KRDS Benefits Taxonomy has a good fit to a lot of its discussion with dimension 1 (direct/indirect), dimension 2 near-term/long term, and dimension 3 private/public – although for REF only non-academic stakeholders are in scope;
• The “Best Practice” (section 7) and “Bad Practice” (section 8 ) of the report provide good generic guidance on completing impact case studies.

The Pilot report notes that the impact element in the REF has the potential to create a number of positive incentives, including:

• Encouraging collaboration between HE and industry, the public sector and third sector.
• Encouraging institutions to support their researchers in more fully realising the wider benefits of the research they undertake. This should include support for realising the benefits from ‘pure’ or ‘basic’ research, as well as supporting research with more immediate potential application.

Dear all

A quick reminder to anyone wishing to respond to the JISC consultation on the draft e-Journal Archiving White paper that the deadline for comments is the end of next week (Friday 12 November).

Details of the consultation and the draft white paper are available here.

Charles Beagrie Limited are pleased to be partners in the DryadUK project which launched earlier this month. DryadUK is a JISC-funded project being run from the British Library and Oxford University, with assistance from NESCent, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), ourselves, and the Research Information Network (RIN).

The project is assisting the further development of Dryad in the following ways:

Expanding Dryad

• By establishing a UK mirror site
• By expanding the service to include new publishers, journals and disciplines

Increasing Dryad sustainability

• By developing a sustainable business plan
• By establishing a framework for evaluating Dryad data usage

Adding value

• Exploring ways to improve metadata standards for deposition, citation and annotation
• Adding usage of DataCite dois.

For further information see the DryadUK webpages.

On 16 September 2010 a rather unique meeting sponsored by NCDD/DEN/and the KB took place in The Hague: the experts from five past and present projects on cost modelling for digital preservation came together to exchange information and discuss future possibilities for international cooperation.

The conference report by Inge Angevaare of this meeting with photographs and a summary of existing costing models is now available. Those who know Inge well will be aware that a camera is never very far away so the report is beautifully illustrated, concise and well worth reading.

The projects discussed included Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS, UK), CMDP (Denmark),LIFE3 (UK), DANS (Netherlands), National Archives Testbed (Netherlands). For those wanting to see more detail of individual presentations they are available here.

Libraries are facing increasing space pressures and funding constraints. There is a growing interest in wherever possible moving more rapidly to e-only provision of academic journals to help alleviate these pressures as well as to provide new electronic services to users.

One of the most cited barriers and concerns both from library and faculty staff to moving to e-only has been sustaining and assuring long-term access to electronic content.

Today JISC has released a consultation draft of a White Paper on e-Journal Archiving for UK Higher Education Libraries (prepared for JISC by Charles Beagrie Ltd). The consultation on the draft white paper is open until 12 November.

Although focussing on the UK sector, many of the economic and emerging best practice issues it addresses will also be of interest to university libraries and research institutions in other countries.

The white paper complements and references other advice and guidance available from JISC on e-journal archiving, in particular A Practical Guide to e-journal Archiving Solutions published in February 2010, which gives a detailed and impartial evaluation of the UK LOCKSS Alliance, CLOCKSS and Portico.

The white paper therefore is primarily focussing on areas not previously covered in JISC guidance, in particular outlining emerging good practice in terms of policy and procedures for institutions and drawing together the economic case for e-journal archiving.

The economic case explores the benefits arising from transitioning from print or print+electronic to electronic-only for current journal licensing; and benefits arising from the purchase or licensing of past electronic issues and/or retro-digitised versions of historic print journals.

The white paper also includes four emerging good practice case studies from the libraries of:

• University of Glasgow
• University of Huddersfield
• London School of Economics
• and the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL)

These were selected to provide a range of emerging UK good practice in large research universities, small-medium scale universities, specialist research universities, and innovative collegiate shared licensing and resource development.

Related Blog Posts

For those interested in the topic of e-journal archiving and licensing electronic content, there are a number of related posts on this blog covering some of our previous work in this field including:

A practical guide to e-journal archiving solutions

Ensuring Perpetual Access – German National Hosting Strategy for electronic resources

and Just published: A Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions

I’ve just looked at our webstats  and the Keeping Research Data Safe Factsheet has  had over 2,000 downloads in its first week of publication. A lot of work went into its development so it is great to see that level of interest.

I am pleased to announce the release of a new Factsheet from the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) project on the costs and benefits of digital preservation. The Factsheet is being made available for download as a PDF file.

If you are attending the  iPRES 2010 conference in Vienna next week there will also be print copies available on the JISC stand.

The A4 four-page factsheet is intended to be suitable for senior managers and others interested in a concise summary of  our key findings. It will be relevant to all repositories and institutions holding digital material but of particular interest to anyone responsible for or involved in the long-term management of research data.

The factsheet covers the following major areas:

• Cost issues in digital preservation (what costs most, impact of fixed costs, declining costs over time)
• Benefits from digital preservation (benefits taxonomy, direct benefits, indirect benefits, near-term benefits, long-term benefits)
• Institutional issues (repository models and structures, key cost variables, data collection levels)

We hope the Factsheet will be of value to the digital preservation and research data communities and plan to release a further KRDS publication later this year (a KRDS User Guide).

The Keeping Research Data Safe studies have been funded by JISC and conducted by a partnership of the following institutions: Charles Beagrie Ltd, OCLC Research, the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service, the University of London Computer Centre, and the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Oxford and Southampton.