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We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the workshop to disseminate the Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Toolset and accompanying materials such as user guides and factsheets to the research community.

Workshop registration is free but please note that places are limited and early registration is advised. Further details of the workshop are as follows:

12.30 -16.00 Tuesday 12th July, 2011 South Bank University, Central London

Programme:
12.30 – 13.15 Registration and buffet lunch
13.15 – 13.25 Welcome and Project Background (Liz Lyon UKOLN)
13.25 – 13.55 The Toolset (Neil Beagrie, Charles Beagrie Ltd)
13.55 – 14.50 Disciplinary Test Sites and Applications (chair Manjula Patel UKOLN)

• Dipak Kalra (Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education at UCL)
• Matthew Woollard (UK Data Archive University of Essex)
• Liz Lyon and Monica Duke (SageCite Project)
• Catherine Hardman (Archaeology Data Service)

14.50 – 15.00 Implications for Funders (Neil Beagrie)
15.00 – 15.20 Break and refreshments
15.20 – 16.00 Plenary Discussion and Questions (chair Liz Lyon, UKOLN)
16.00 Close
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Background

The “Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools” project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and runs from 1st February to 31 July 2011.

The project has tested and reviewed the combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Framework and the Value Chain and Impact Analysis tool, which were first applied in the I2S2 project for assessing the benefits and impact of digital preservation of research data. We have extended their utility to, and adoption within, the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation.

The project plan is on the project website and the project outputs will be available from the website during the summer.

The project partners are UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Bath,the Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education (CHIME) at University College London , the UK Data Archive (University of Essex), the Archaeology Data Service (University of York), OCLC Research, and Charles Beagrie Limited.

The Digital Preservation Coalition and Charles Beagrie Limited are delighted to announce a collaboration to produce 5 new DPC Technology Watch Reports. The collaboration follows a DPC call for proposals issued in December last year and selection of Charles Beagrie Limited as the preferred bidder.

The collaboration will produce a series of 5 Technology Watch Reports over the next 12 months under the general supervision of an editorial board and Neil Beagrie as principal investigator and commissioning editor. The 5 proposed reports and their authors are as follows:

• Preserving Email, Chris Prom
• Preserving Moving Picture and Sound, Richard Wright
• Intellectual Property Rights for Preservation, Andrew Charlesworth
• Digital Forensics and Preservation, Jeremy Leighton John
• Trust in Post Cancellation Access Services, Neil Beagrie

The DPC is establishing an editorial board for the series. It will be chaired by William Kilbride, Executive Director of the DPC.

The collaboration represents an exciting new development for the DPC and Charles Beagrie Ltd and the opportunity is being taken to re-vamp the design and layout of the new series. Content outlines for individual reports will be shared with DPC members and shaped by their needs and requirements. DPC members will have a period of privileged advance access to each report prior to wider public release.

The DPC Technology Watch Report series was established in 2002 and has been one of the Coalition’s most enduring contributions to the wider digital preservation community.  They exist to provide authoritative support and foresight to those engaged with digital preservation or having to tackle digital preservation problems for the first time. These publications support members work forces, they identify disseminate and discuss best practices and they lower the barriers to participation in digital preservation.

‘Each ‘Technology Watch Report’ analyses a particular topic in digital preservation, evaluating workable solutions, and investigating new tools and techniques appropriate for different contexts,’ explained William Kilbride of the DPC.  ‘The reports are written by leaders-in-the-field and are peer-reviewed prior to publication.  The intended audience is worldwide, especially in the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, USA, and Canada.’

‘We expect that these reports will have a wide readership,’ explained Neil Beagrie, the commissioning editor.  ‘The audience includes members and non-members of the coalition; staff of commercial and public agencies; repository managers, librarians and archivists charged with managing electronic resources; senior staff and executives of intellectual property organizations in the private and public sectors; those who teach and train information scientists; as well as policy advisors requiring an advanced introduction to specific issues and researchers developing DP solutions.’

Further publicity on each report in the series will be released over the course of the next 12 months to DPC members and the wider community.  The draft outline of contents for the first report – Preserving Email – has already been compiled and will be distributed shortly.

• To find out more about the DPC and its Technology Watch series, including the current ones in the set, see: http://www.dpconline.org/advice/technology-watch-reports
• For more about Charles Beagrie Ltd, see: http://www.beagrie.com/

There was a 6 minute interview on digital preservation and personal digital archives on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme at 8.21 am UK time this morning with Richard Ovenden (chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition), John Sutherland of UCL, and John Humphries of the BBC. The discussion did feel a bit weak in places and the researcher input to the discussion perhaps could have been balanced with input from someone active in the digital humanities but it was still interesting to hear and the digital library/archive case is well put by Richard Ovenden. You can now listen to a recording of the discussion online.

The official description of the broadcast is as follows: The poet Wendy Cope has sold her archive to the British Library for £32,000, a bounty that includes everything from letters, diaries and drafts to more than 40,000 emails.John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, and Richard Ovenden, of the Bodleian Library, consider whether emails really denote a digital form of art, and what impact the email will have for future literary research.

Projects from the JISC Managing Research Data Programme were involved in a Parallel Session at the annual JISC Conference on Tuesday this week.

Entitled ‘The benefits of more effective research data management in UK Universities’, the session explained how projects have been developing ’Benefits Case Studies’  with support from Charles Beagrie Ltd to provide evidence of the positive effects of improvements which they have engineered.  The case studies provide significant indications of improved research efficiency through more effective research data management.  The case studies will be synthesised in a report by Neil Beagrie due for release in May.

Presentations from the parallel session are available online at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11/programme/1researchdata.aspx

They are best perused in the following order:

Simon Hodson, JISCMRD, Introduction
Neil Beagrie, Cost-Benefits and Business Cases Support Role
Manjula Patel and Neil Beagrie, I2S2 Project, UKOLN, University of Bath
June Finch, MaDAM Project, University of Manchester
Jonathan Tedds, HALOGEN Project, University of Leicester

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new project focussing on development of a digital preservation benefits analysis toolset.

The “Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools” project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and will run from 1^st February to 31 July 2011.

The project  aims to test, review and promote combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Taxonomy and the Value Chain and Impact Analysis tool first applied in the I2S2 project  for assessing the benefits and impact of digital preservation of research data. We will extend their utility to and adoption within the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation. We will demonstrate and critique the tools, and then create and disseminate the toolset and accompanying materials such as User Guides and Factsheets to the wider community.

A project website is at http://beagrie.com/krds-i2s2.php and the project plan and project outputs will be available from the website in due course. A dissemination event to mark the conclusion of the project will be held in central London on 12 July 2011 (further details and registration will be announced in May).

The project partners are UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Bath, the Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education (CHIME) at University College London , the UK Data Archive (University of Essex), the Archaeology Data Service(University of York),  OCLC Research, and  Charles Beagrie Limited.

The Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) has published its Review of JISC today and there is a JISC webpage and FAQ available with the consultation on the review and its recommendations and findings.

The independent review was chaired by Professor Sir Alan Wilson and carried out over a four month period. It concludes that “JISC is an invaluable national resource which has evolved in response to increasing demands over 20 years”.

Alongside the praise of JISC and its achievements, major changes are proposed. Sections in the review that caught my eye (a very subjective selection) were as follows:

“Research and development activity should focus on horizon-scanning and thought leadership”

“Services and projects should be rationalised, with a view to significantly reducing their number”

“JISC should be funded through a combination of grants and subscriptions/user charges”

“It should become a separate legal entity and the implications of this for the four companies should be reviewed”
(all from Para 5 Recommendations)

“Proven best practice may be of greater benefit to the sector in an era of resource constraint than widespread R&D whose payback may be uncertain” (from Para 36)

“JISC’s promotion of the open agenda (open access, open resources, open source and open standards) is more controversial. This area alone is addressed by 24 programmes, 119 projects and five services.A number of institutions are enthusiastic about this, but perceive an anti-publisher bias and note the importance of working in partnership with the successful UK publishing industry. Publishers find the JISC stance problematic.” (Para 48)

“JISC should offer sector leadership through “routes to best practice”, wherever such practice resides…This function might be described as the “JISC Demonstrator Lab”…Research and development activity should focus on horizon-scanning and thought leadership – through a “JISC Futures Lab”. This would include a small number of research activities, where this is appropriate…Services and projects should be rationalised, with a view to significantly reducing their number – based on clear criteria such as: size, impact, value for money from sharing services, and the possibility of commercial or other alternatives…” (from para 77)

“In consolidating the provision of services, particular attention should be paid to the possibility of reducing geographical dispersion and improving efficiency.” (para 84)

“In the current financial climate it may not be possible to continue to fund JISC activities on their present scale. In the opinion of the Review Group, it is reasonable to expect the above recommendations to deliver substantial savings in overall costs. This should be achieved through new governance arrangements, a simpler structure, the review and consolidation of services, and across JANET (UK), JISC Collections and JISC Advance.” (para 85)

There is a JISCPress version of the HEFCE Review of JISC. It enables you to comment on the document at the paragraph level, and to both see and respond to other users’ comments. You can also add and see comments on the JISC review webpage and read a blog entry by Malcolm Read on the review.

The Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) project has produced a widely used KRDS Activity Model for costing digital preservation of research data. KRDS has developed from relatively small-scale incremental projects and we recognise that there were still significant areas for future work such as the recently published (Dec 2010) KRDS User Guide. The KRDS2 final report published earlier last year outlined a number of key recommendations for future development including:

• “Examine further development of the pre-archive phase of the KRDS2 activity model and produce versions of the model from a researcher’s perspective.”

This suggested work has now been addressed by one of the outputs from the Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences (I2S2) Project funded under the Research Data Management Infrastructure strand of the JISC’s Managing Research Data Programme.

I2S2 has been using KRDS as a basis for costing and benefits analysis. One of the outputs has been an “Idealised Scientific Research Data Lifecycle Model”, which seeks to extend and adapt from a “researcher perspective”, the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Activity Model, providing a model which reflects “research data management” or the digital preservation lifecycle in its broadest interpretation. It adapts KRDS from an archive-centric to a researcher-centric view by:

• Defining and emphasising more of the activities in the research (KRDS “Pre-Archive” ) phase where research data is created;
• Adding a “Publication” set of activities;
• Concatenating the KRDS “Archive” phase activities in the centre of the model for simplification and presentational purposes;
• Adding some specific local research administration activities;
• In addition for the purposes of the project, it adds some selective detail of information flows and information objects between the activities.

This is the current version (Dec 2010) of the I2S2 Idealised Model.

Note this is an idealised model and several activities such as peer review or conduct experiment may have multiple instances or repetitions. “Documentation, Metadata, and Storage” may also  be undertaken as researcher activities independent of the archive in other instances and in the KRDS activity model. It also represents a project view as of December 2010 and may be subject to further changes.

A PPT version of the I2S2 model incorporating relevant notes is available on the I2S2 project website.

The I2S2 project aims to understand and identify the requirements for a data-driven research infrastructure in the Structural Sciences.  The work is focused on the exemplar domain of Chemistry, but with a view towards inter-disciplinary application. Current work inter alia includes developing a set of tools and approaches to identify and provide indicators and metrics for the benefits arising from I2S2. This will extend work and the tools available for implementing the KRDS Benefits Taxonomy.

The partners in I2S2 are UKOLN (University of Bath), the Digital Curation Centre, University of Southampton, University of Cambridge, Science & Technology Facilities Council, and Charles Beagrie Ltd.