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The Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access is now available.  The report Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information describes its work as follows:

“…questions remain about what digital information we should preserve, who is responsible for preserving, and who will pay.

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access investigated these questions from an economic perspective. In this report, we identify problems intrinsic to all preserved digital materials, and propose actions that stakeholders can take to meet these challenges to sustainability. We developed action agendas that are targeted to major stakeholder groups and to domain-specific preservation strategies.

The Task Force focused its inquiry on materials that are of long-term public interest, looking at four content domains with diverse preservation profiles:

• Scholarly discourse: the published output of scholarly inquiry
• Research data: the primary inputs into research, as well as the first-order results of that research
• Commercially owned cultural content: culturally significant digital content that is owned by a private entity and is under copyright protection; and
• Collectively produced Web content: Web content that is created interactively, the result of collaboration and contributions by consumers.”

I have not had chance to look at the report in detail but hope to add a short commentary to the blog in due course.

I am pleased to announce that the findings from the Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (“KRDS2) survey of digital preservation cost information are now available on the KRDS2 project webpage.

One of the core aims of the KRDS2 project was to identify potential sources of cost information for preservation of digital research data and to conduct a survey of them. Between September and November 2009 we made an open invitation via email lists and the project blog and project webpage for others to contact us and contribute to the data survey if they had research datasets and associated cost information that they believe may be of interest to the study.

13 survey responses were received: 11 of these were from UK-based collections, and 2 were from mainland Europe. Two further potential contributions from the USA were unfortunately not available in time to be included.

The responses covered a broad area of research including the arts and humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences and research data archives or cultural heritage collections. Each survey response is approximately 6-8 pages in length.

A summary analysis plus individual completed responses to the data survey that provide  more detail, are available.

We have also made the revised versions of the KRDS2 activity model available to download.

We aim to release the KRDS2 report via JISC in March following peer review and final editing. Further supplementary materials from KRDS2 will also be placed on the project webpage in March.

You will also notice that we have recently undertaken a major website re-design and made additions, should you wish to browse other information on the web site.

We are starting up and partnering in a number of new and interesting consultancy projects which run into 2010 as follows:

Dryad is an emerging digital repository for supplementary data underlying published works in ecology, evolution, and related fields being developed by a consortium of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in the US and relevant scientific societies and academic journals. Its goals are to:

• – preserve all the underlying data reported in a paper at the time of publication, when there is the greatest incentive and ability for authors to share their data. This is particularly important in the case of data for which a specialized repository does not exist.

• – lower the burden of data sharing by providing one-stop data-deposition via handshaking with specialized repositories.

• – assign globally unique identifiers to datasets, thus enabling data citations.

• - allow end-users to perform sophisticated searches over data (not only by publication, but also by taxon, geography, geological age, biological concept, etc).

• - allow journals and societies to pool their resources for one shared repository.

• - enable bidirectional search and retrieval with data repositories from related disciplines.

The strategic priorities for Dryad emerged from a May 2007 workshop on “Data Preservation, Sharing, and Discovery: Challenges for Small Science in the Digital Era“, at which a variety of stakeholder journals and societies were represented.

I am pleased to announce that Charles Beagrie Limited will be working with the Dryad project team to develop a business plan and sustainability for the Dryad repository. Neil Beagrie and Julia Chruszcz will lead the consultancy with research support from Peter Williams. Further information on Dryad, the partners and the latest developments can be found on the Dryad website.

I2S2 - The  Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences (I2S2) Project  is funded under the Research Data Management Infrastructure strand of the JISC’s Managing Research Data Programme, with a duration of 18 months (Oct 2009 to March 2011). It will identify requirements for a data-driven research infrastructure in “Structural Science”, focussing on the domain of Chemistry, but with a view towards inter-disciplinary application.

Two research data management pilots  will examine the business processes of research, and highlight the benefits of an integrated approach. Both pilots will address traversing administrative boundaries between institutions to national facilities in addition to issues of scale (local laboratory to national facilities, DIAMOND synchrotron and ISIS respectively).

A key component of the infrastructure will be a harmonised Integrated Information Model to include all stages of the Data Life Cycle. A “before and after” cost-benefit analysis will be performed using the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS2) model, which will be extended to address specific requirements in I2S2. We are looking forward to working with UKOLN (University of Bath and DCC), The Universities of Southampton and Cambridge, and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the project.

The latest Volume of Ariadne (issue 60 July 2009) publishes an article based on recent work by Charles Beagrie Limited and Serco Consulting for the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility Study. It should be of interest to an international as well as UK audience as may of the issues addressed apply to research and research data  issues in any national context.

Research Data Preservation and Access: The Views of Researchers present findings from a UKRDS survey of researchers’ views on and practices for preservation and dissemination of research data in four UK universities (Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, and Oxford) and place them in the wider UK and international context.

A preliminary report from the Survey was included in the UKRDS Interim Report . Elements of the Survey and its findings were also incorporated in the Final Report of the UKRDS Feasibility Study submitted to HEFCE . However space constraints precluded presentation of all the data and findings in full in these reports and they were mainly included in a separate unpublished appendix. This article therefore aims to publish more of this material and set it in its context  with updates from more recent published studies.

The project plan and project webpage for the JISC-funded Keeping Research Data Safe 2 project (KRDS2) are now available on the Charles Beagrie website. The webpage has been set-up to support dissemination of information on the project and provide the background to the work, details of the project partners, and the project plan.

The first Keeping Research Data Safe study funded by JISC made a major contribution to the study of preservation costs by developing a cost model and indentifying cost variables for preserving research data in UK universities.

KRDS2 aims to extend this previous work on digital preservation costs. It is identifying long-lived datasets for the purpose of cost analysis and building on the work of the first “Keeping Research Data Safe” study completed in 2008.

The KRDS2 project commenced on 31 March 2009 and will complete in December 2009. For further information see  the project plan.

160 people gathered today at the Royal Society at the one day international conference on the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility Study.

The eight page management summary from the final report has been made available on the UKRDS website to co-incide with the conference. This recommends to HEFCE that the UKRDS is feasible and should be funded over a period of at least 5 years. In the first instance it recommends a 2-year Pathfinder phase should be funded at a cost of £5.31m.  It estimates overall savings delivered by a scaled-up UKRDS service to be the financial equivalent of 63.5 FTEs over a period of five years.
You can also find the presentations from the day available online.

HEFCE is still considering the report but it said to regard it favourably. A final decision is awaited.

A potentially important development in digital curation is the creation of a new International Society for Biocuration.

The mission of the Society will be to:

1. Define the work of biocurators for the scientific community and the public funding agencies;
2. Propose a discussion forum for interested biocurators, developers, scientists and students.
3. Organize a regular meeting where biocurators will be able to present their work and discuss their projects.
4. Lobby to obtain increased and stable funding for biocuration resources that are essential to research;
5. Build a relationship with publishers and establish a link between researchers and databases through journal publishers
6. Organize a regular workshop where new biocurators, or interested students can be trained in the use of the common tools needed for their work.
7. Provide documentation on the use of common database and bioinformatics tools.
8. Provide ‘Gold Standards’ for databases, such as the use of unique, traceable identifiers, use of shared tools, etc.;
9. Share documentation on standards and annotation procedures with the aim of developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
10. Foster connections with user communities to ensure that databases and accompanying tools meet specific user needs;
11. Maintain a biocurator job market forum.

The new Society will have its official launch at the 3rd International Biocuration Conference 16-19 April 2009 in Berlin.

Digital Preservation has been tipped as an emerging technology to watch by a leading IT magazine.

Yesterday’s ComputerWeekly has an  article in its IT Management section on How to beat the recession using underutilised technology by Michael Pincher. It focuses on how IT vendors can look at emerging technologies and customer requirements to innovate and begin to buck the recession.

Its an interesting article looking at overlooked areas of corporate innovation, key markets, “hype cycles”, and emerging technologies.

The emerging technologies section particularly caught my eye mentioning that digital preservation is a growth area in data management. In addition related issues such as regulatory compliance technologies, content management and repositories, infrastructure protection, storage management, and risk management are highlighted.

The list of emerging technologies is provided to give food for thought and help advise on business and innovation potential in the marketplace. The content of the article however should be of interest to a much wider readership and I highly recommend reading it.

Readers of the blog may be interested in the article Digital Archivists in Demand which appeared in the Fresh Starts column of business section of the New York Times on Saturday in both print and online editions. This is a monthly column covering emerging jobs and job trends.

The piece focusses on careers for digital asset managers, digital archivists and digital preservation officers and how demand for them is expanding. It features Jacob Nadal, the preservation officer at the University of California, Los Angeles and Victoria McCargar, a preservation consultant in Los Angeles and a lecturer at U.C.L.A. and San José State University.

Vicky McCargar estimates that 20,000 people work in the field today — plus others in related areas — and she expects that to triple over the next decade, assuming that economic conditions stabilise before long.

US rates of pay for Digital Archivists are also cited in the article. Digital asset managers at public facilities would do well to make $70,000 a year. Salaries for their corporate counterparts are generally higher. Consultants who can make recommendations on systems can make $150 an hour.Those who manage them in the commercial sector once they’re up and running make from the $70,000’s up to $100,000 a year.

Despite the higher pay in the corporate world Jacob Nadal outlines the case for working in the public sector: “Public-sector institutions just strike me as far, far cooler. They have better collections, obviously, and they are innovative, connected and challenging in ways that seem more substantial to me.”

It is good to see that mainstream newspapers are beginning to see digital archiving as an emerging career path. I have given short seminars on digital preservation and curation to students on the Information Studies courses at UCL over the last couple of years. I always emphasis to them that not only is it intellectually challenging field but a very good career option for those with a traditional archive or library training and an interest in electronic information.