Beagrie.com

Seamus Ross, professor of humanities informatics and digital curation at the University of Glasgow, has been appointed the new dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at Toronto University for a seven-year term effective 1st January 2009. There is further information on the appointment in the June issue of the University of Toronto Bulletin.

I am pleased to announce that the JISC-funded report A Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions has just been published and is now available to download as a pdf from the JISC Collections website. It has been a great pleasure to work with Julia Chruszcz, Maggie Jones and Terry Morrow on this study over the last few months.

The report is the result of a call by the JISC, issued in January 2008, for a Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions. The Invitation to Tender asked for a report that “will be published for wide use by institutions to inform policies and investment in e-journal archiving solutions.” The ITT also stated that the report should “also inform negotiations undertaken by JISC Collections and NESLi2 when seeking publishers’ compliance to deposit content with at least one e-journal archiving solution.”

The report contains chapters covering: Approaches to e-journal preservation, Publisher licensing and legal deposit, Comparisons of Six Current e-Journal Archiving Programmes (LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, the KB e-depot, OCLC’s Electronic Collections Online, and the British Library’s e-journal Digital Archive), Practical experience of e-journal archiving solutions, Evaluation of four common scenarios/trigger events, and Criteria for judging relevance and value of new archiving initiatives. There are two appendices on Publisher Participation in different programmes.

The report has the following recommendations:

1. When negotiating NESLi2 agreements, JISC’s negotiators should take the initiative by specifying archiving requirements, including a short-list of approved archiving solutions.
2. To help quantify the insurance risk and the necessary appropriate investment, bodies representing publishers and other trade organisations should gather and share statistical information on the likelihood of the trigger events outlined in this report.
3. Post cancellation access conditions should be defined in the licensing agreement between libraries and publishers. Publishers should be strongly encouraged to cooperate with one or more external e-journal archiving solutions as well as provide their own post-cancellation service (at minimal cost).
4. The publisher (or subscription agent) should state their policy on perpetual access under the four scenarios described in section 9.
5. When titles are sold on to other publishers, the Transfer Code of Practice (see section 9.3.) should be followed.
6. Archiving service providers and publishers should work together to develop standard cross-industry definitions of trigger events and protocols on the conditions for release of archived content. Project Transfer is a potential exemplar. The ground rules for any post-trigger event negotiation should be clear and transparent and established  in advance.
7. Archive service providers must provide greater clarity on coverage details, including not only publishers and titles, but also the years and issues included in the archive.
8. Using the scenarios outlined in this report, libraries should carry out a risk assessment on the impact of loss of access to e-journals by their institution, and a cost/benefit analysis, in order to judge the value and relevance of the archiving solutions on offer.
9. Relevant UK bodies and institutions should use whatever influence they can bring to bear to ensure that archiving solutions cover publishers and titles of particular value to UK libraries.
10. The findings of this study should be reviewed and updated at regular intervals to reflect continuing developments in the field of e-journal archiving and preservation.

Its publication comes hot on the heels of two related studies  the Portico/Ithaka e-journal archiving survey of US Library Directors  and the JISC-funded UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme Evaluation Report. A further blog entry will follow!

I have posted two previous entries to the blog in March and January detailing progress with the JISC-funded research data preservation costs study. I am pleased to report that the online executive summary and full report (pdf file) titled “Keeping Research Data Safe: a cost model and guidance for UK Universities” is now published and can be downloaded from the JISC website.

It has been an very intensive piece of work over four months and I am extremely grateful to the many colleagues who contributed and made this possible. We have uncovered a lot of valuable data and approaches and hope this can be built on by future studies and implementation and testing. We have attempted to “show our workings” as far as possible to facilitate this so  the text of the report is accompanied by extensive appendices.

We have made 10 recommendations on future work and implementation. For further information see the Executive Summary online.

The report iteself has chapters covering the Introduction, Methodology, Benefits of Research Data Preservation, Describing the Cost Framework and its Use, Key Cost Variables and Units,the Activity Model and Resources Template, Overviews of the Case Studies, Issues Universities Need to Consider, Different Service Models and Structures, Conclusions and Recommendations. There are also four detailed case studies covering the Universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Southampton, and the Archaeology Data Service (University of York).

Although focused on the UK and UK universities in particular, it should be of interest to anyone involved with research data or interested generally in the costs of digital preservation.

Comments and Feedback welcome!

Articles on Personal Archiving seem to be like the old-fashioned view of buses- nothing for a while then a whole lot in a row. Last month had a bumper crop. First of all two articles by Cathy Marshall in the latest issue (March/April 2008 vol 14 No 3/4)of D-Lib: “Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 1” and “Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 2“.

Hot on their heels in the April 2008 Issue of Ariadne comes “Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections” by Pete Williams et al on the Digital Lives project.

All three articles are highly recommended to those interested in this field.

At the same time Ian Rowlands at UCL is soliciting further input into digital lives  - if you can help please complete the online questionnaire -further details as follows:

Digital Lives: Helping People to Capture and Secure their Individual Memories, their Personal Creativity, their Shared Historic Moments

Increasingly, our family memories, our personal achievements, our experiences of historical events, are being facilitated and recorded digitally.

Digital Lives is a pathfinding research project that is setting out to understand how individuals retain and manage their personal collections of computerised information  - everything from digital photographs and videos to favourite podcasts and sentimental email messages - and how these digital collections can best be captured in the first place and preserved in the long term, perhaps for family history, biographical or other purposes.

The project is led by Dr Jeremy Leighton John and colleagues at the British Library who, together with experts from UCL and Bristol University, are researching the challenges that lie ahead as more and more of our memories and documentary witnesses exist in electronic form.

We would like to invite you to take part in our research by completing an online survey.  This should take no more than ten minutes of your time and it will provide us with crucial information that will benefit the work of the British Library and other archives enormously as we plan for what is fast becoming a largely digital world.

If you would like to take part in the survey, please click here: <http://tinyurl.com/5wtwgm>.
If you would like to enter our Prize Draw and stand a chance of winning £200 in British Library gift vouchers (drawn at random and with no further obligation) you can register your interest at the end of the survey. Please note that all responses are strictly confidential.  No individuals will be named when we report our findings, and the information collected will only be presented in an aggregated form.  You will not be contacted again as a result of completing this survey.

If you have any questions, or are concerned about the bona fides of this survey, please email me at University College London by clicking here: <mailto:i.rowlands@ucl.ac.uk>.
Dr Ian Rowlands (UCL School of Library, Archive & Information Studies)
(Digital Lives is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council: Grant number BLRC 8669).

There is an excellent supplement on academic libraries today in the Guardian produced jointly with JISC. I would highly recommend it to international and UK colleagues who want a quick overview of latest developments in UK academic libraries.

You can also read the supplement online.

The supplement includes articles and overviews under the headings:

• Colleges, universities and the digital challenge
• Learning spaces
• Library 2.0
• New business models
• Digitisation
• The New User
• and last but by no means least [new] Librarians.

On Friday 18th April the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) celebrated its 25th anniversary and launched it new organisational title: Research Libraries UK (RLUK). A warm welcome to RLUK and best wishes for the next 25 years!

Further information and a press release is available on the RLUK website.

Now in its fourth year, the annual C21st Curation lecture series is held at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) in University College London.

The 2008 C21st Curation public evening lectures will be on 30 April 2008. Come hear two speakers, Roy Clare (Chief Executive, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) and Carole Souter (Chief Executive, Heritage Lottery Fund) talk about the impact of the recent Government Comprehensive Spending Review on their respective organisations. This seminar is open to students, professionals and the general public in the JZ Young lecture theatre at UCL from 6.00 -7.15pm, followed by a reception to which the speakers and the audience are invited. Attendance is free, but please email slais-admin@ucl.ac.uk to reserve a place.

I will be chairing the session and look forward to the lectures and seeing colleagues at the reception afterwards.

For further information and directions see the SLAIS C21st Curation lectures webpage .

I’m pleased to announce on the blog that Charles Beagrie successfully tendered to complete a study on institutional digital preservation policies for JISC. Our consultancy team for the project will be Neil Beagrie (project lead), Najla Rettberg (nee Semple), and Richard Wright. We will start work this month and submit in September.

As many of you will know, the JISC has supported UK Further Education and Higher Education institutions in addressing the challenges of long-term management and preservation of their digital assets through funding of a range of research and development programmes and advisory services. A recent synthesis of its digital preservation and records management programme noted that ’the costs and benefits of developing a coherent, managed and sustainable approach to institutional preservation of digital assets remain unexplored’. Across the sector the development of institutional preservation policies is currently sporadic and digital preservation issues are rarely considered in key strategic plans. The lack of preservation policies and as a result the lack of consideration of digital preservation issues in other institutional strategies is seen as a major stumbling block by the community.

We look forward to helping institutions address this challenge and hope our forthcoming work will be of value to a wide range of different organisations.

I blogged back in January on the JISC Research Data Preservation Costs study and promised an update at the end of March. Well the draft final report titled “Keeping Research Data Safe: A Cost Model and Guidance for UK Universities” is now with JISC and being peer-reviewed.

It’s been a significant effort and I think it should be a major contribution to thinking on digital preservation cost models and costs in general – hopefully the final report will be out later this Spring.  In short we have produced:

• A cost framework consisting of:

o A list of key cost variables divided into economic adjustments (inflation/deflation, depreciation, and costs of capital), and service adjustments (volume and number of deposits, user services, etc);

o An activity model divided into pre-archive, archive, and support services;

o A resources template including major cost categories in TRAC ( a methodology for Full Economic Costing used by UK universities); and divided into the major phases from our activity model  and by duration of activity.

Typically the activity model will help identify resources required or expended, the economic adjustments help spread and maintain these over time, and the service adjustments help identify and adjust resources to specific requirements. The resources template provides a framework to draw these elements together so that they can be implemented in a TRAC-based cost model. Normally the cost model will implement these as a spreadsheet, populated with data and adjustments agreed by the institution.

The three parts of the cost framework can be used in this way to develop and apply local cost models. The exact application may depend on the purpose of the costing which might include: identifying current costs; identifying former or future costs; or comparing costs across different collections and institutions which have used different variables. These are progressively more difficult. The model may also be used to develop a charging policy or appropriate archiving costs to be charged to projects.

In addition to the cost framework there are:

• A series of case studies from Cambridge University, King’s College London, Southampton University, and the Archaeology Data Service at York University, illustrating different aspects of costs for research data within HEIs;

• A cost spreadsheet based on the study developed by the Centre for e-Research King’s College London for its own forward planning and provided as a confidential supplement to its case study in the report;

• Recommendations for future work and use/adaptation of software costing tools to assist implementation.

Watch this space (well blog) for a future announcement of the final report and url for the download.

The first  issue of the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available.

In this issue you will find:
• News about new digital preservation partnerships
•  Recent reports and presentations
• Digital preservation tips for a general audience
• An announcement about the new Director at the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. 

Check http://www.digitalpreservation.gov for weekly updates or sign up for the RSS feed at http://www.loc.gov/rss/ (be sure to select “Digital Preservation.” ).