Beagrie.com

Twenty years ago format obsolescence was seen as the greatest long-term threat to digital information.  Arguably, experience to date has shown that funding and organisational challenges are perhaps more significant threats. I hope this presentation helps those grappling with these challenges and shows some key advances in how to use knowledge of costs, benefits and value to support long-term sustainability of digital data and services.

These are the slides from my keynote presentation to the joint Digital Preservation Coalition / Jisc workshop on Digital Assets and Digital Liabilities – the Value of Data held in Glasgow in February 2018. The slides summarise work over the last decade in the key areas of exploring costs, benefits and value for data. The slides posted here have additional slide notes and references to new publications since the workshop and some modifications such as removal of animations. One day I hope to have time to synthesis this presentation in an accessible way as a more extensive article but hope this slide deck on Slide share at https://www.slideshare.net/Nbeagrie is a useful interim resource.

“What To Keep?” a new Jisc research data report by Charles Beagrie Ltd has just been published by Jisc. You can access the full report directly at: https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/7262/

What to keep in terms of research data has been a recognised issue for some time but research data management and in particular appraisal and selection (i.e. “what to keep and why”) has become a more significant focus in recent years as volumes and diversity of data have grown, and as the available infrastructure for ‘keeping’ has become more diverse.

The purpose of the What to Keep report is to provide new insights that will be useful to institutions, research funders, researchers, publishers, and Jisc on what research data to keep and why, the current position, and suggestions for improvement.

The analysis of emerging themes and mappings is available as a set of tables. Seven mini case studies illustrate in more detail the approaches and rationale for what to keep for different repositories, stakeholders and disciplinary areas.

The report provides insights on how what to keep decisions can be guided and supported, and the ten study recommendations and the potential implementations for them, provide practical suggestions for future development.