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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!

The Open Repositories conference (OR2008) repository is available at http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ as a permanent record of the conference activities.

The repository contains papers, presentations and poster artwork for 144 different conference contributions from the main conference sessions (Interoperability, Legal, Models, Architectures & Frameworks, National Perspectives, Scientific Repositories, Social Networking, Sustainability, Usage, Web 2.0), the Poster session, User Group sessions (DSpace, EPrints, Fedora), Birds of a Feather sessions, the Repository Managers session and the ORE Information day.

My powerpoint presentation from the Plenary keynote for the Fedora International Users’ Meeting is also available there. Titled “Keeping alert: issues to know today for long-term digital preservation with repositories” it focussed on research data and sustainability. It drew heavily from the forthcoming JISC Research Data Preservation Costs study and the draft final report titled “Keeping Research Data Safe: A Cost Model and Guidance for UK Universities”. It concludes by outlining tentative findings and implications for repositories from that report.

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.

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.

I’m pleased to announce on the blog that Tee EM Consulting (Terry Morrow) and Charles Beagrie Limited successfully bid in February for the contract to complete a study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions. It will be great to work with Terry on this study. The consultants from Charles Beagrie Limited will be myself and Maggie Jones. I’ve worked a lot with Maggie in the past and am really looking forward to working with her again on this study and e-journal archiving issues.

The aims of the investigation into e-journal archiving solutions are:

a. To provide UK institutions with real-world scenarios that will enable them to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the various archiving solutions. Different archiving solutions may suit some types of content more than others and depending on their focus, suit some institutions more than others;
b. To build on existing literature in this field, both JISC funded reports and other relevant material;
c. To identify and explore the potential differences across academic disciplines in the use and eventual exploitation of archived e-journal material;
d. To identify and explore the future needs of those working in UK HE/FE institutions, including researchers, teachers, students and librarians, in relation to archived e-journal material;
e. To identify and explore the future needs of a range of different teaching and research-oriented organizations, in relation to archived e-journal material.

It’s still quite rare to see research library webpages covering the issues of how to manage and curate contemporary special collections in digital formats so I would like to flag up two particularly good examples here.
The first is the The Wellcome Trust Library’s Digital Curation webpages I came across recently. It is an excellent “how to” guide and sharing of practical experience in dealing with digital special collections built up over the last couple of years at Wellcome. It includes links to the Library Strategy, a “Digital Curation Toolbox”, and useful glossary and links.
The second is the Workbook on Digital Private Papers produced by the Paradigm project. The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (paradigm) project funded by JISC involved the research libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. The workbook captures the project’s experience in accessioning and ingesting digital private papers into their digital repositories, and processing these in line with archival and digital preservation requirements.

Both are highly recommended.

I’m currently looking closely at various efforts by different organisations to capture and model digital preservation costs as part of our work for JISC on developing a preservation cost model for research data.

As part of desk research for that work I have re-visited the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) Charging Policy now in its 4th edition (November 2007). I remember its first edition 10 years ago and being invited to comment on it when I was at the Arts and Humanities Data Service. It has continued to develop over the last 10 years but lost none of its accessibility and (professional) interest.

In short, it is a very user friendly, concise and informative document aimed at its depositors in the archaeological data community but its treatment of digital preservation costs and the thorny issue of charging are likely to make it of much wider interest hence this blog entry!

Digital Preservation costs are categorised and briefly explained  under four headings:

• management and administration
• Ingest
• Dissemination
• Storage and refreshment

The document identifies charges for standard deposits and levels of service and indicates potential variants and additional costs. There is an accompanying webpage on refreshment costs.

Its a fascinating (honest) and short read - highly recommended.

For those following the aftermath of the AHRC decision to stop funding the AHDS the following snippet from the charging policy may also be of interest:
“The ADS currently receives some core funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The AHRC have indicated that the ADS should investigate a move toward a responsive mode funding for archives created by AHRC funded projects in the long term. In the past the ADS has waived deposit charges for researchers based in UK Higher Education Institutions. Due to the change in our core funding arrangements, from 1st January 2008 ALL deposits, whether from projects created within or outwith UK Higher Education will be subject to some level of charge.”