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We are pleased to announce that the Digital Preservation Coalition is offering its members a preview of the latest DPC Technology Watch Report ‘Digital Forensics and Preservation’ by Jeremy Leighton John of the British Library. This is the fourth report in the DPC technology watch series to have been commissioned with Charles Beagrie Ltd as series editors.

The report provides a broad overview of digital forensics with pointers to resources and tools that may benefit the preservation of digital cultural heritage. More specifically, the report focuses on the application of digital forensics to the curation of personal digital archives.

‘Digital forensics is associated in many people’s minds primarily with the investigation of crime. However, In recent years, digital forensics has also emerged as an essential source of tools and approaches for facilitating digital preservation, specifically for protecting and investigating evidence from the past,’ explained the author. ‘Institutional repositories and professionals with responsibilities for personal archives can benefit from using forensic tools and technique to address digital authenticity, accountability and accessibility.’

‘Forensic technology makes it possible to identify privacy issues, establish a chain of custody, employ write protection for capture and transfer of data, and detect forgeries. It can extract relevant metadata and content, it enables efficient indexing and searching, and it facilitates the management of access rights.’

Four more reports are in development – on Preservation, Trust and E-Journals; Preserving Computer Aided Design; Web Archiving; and Preservation Metadata.

The series editors have been supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who have commented on the text prior to release. The Editorial Board comprises William Kilbride (Chair), Neil Beagrie (Principal Investigator and Managing Editor for the series), Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth), Sarah Higgins (Archives and Records Association), Tim Keefe (Trinity College Dublin), Andrew McHugh (University of Glasgow), and Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library).

The report is currently available as a preview for DPC members only and a login required. It will be available for general public release from the DPC website in Spring 2013.

We are pleased to announce that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK has published the report of the Economic Impact Evaluation of the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) to coincide with the launch of the new UK Data Service that succeeds it.

The ESDS has its origins in the UK Data Archive established over 40 years ago and this one of the longest standing research data archives and proponents of digital preservation in the World. The impact evaluation therefore may be of interest to the digital preservation and data curation communities beyond the social sciences and economics, particularly as quantitative as well as qualitative evidence of impact in our fields is still relatively rare.

The Economic Impact Evaluation of the Economic and Social Data Service report (PDF file) was produced by Charles Beagrie Ltd and the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) Victoria University and was authored by Neil Beagrie, John Houghton, Anna Palaiologk and Peter Williams. It combines approaches for qualitative and quantitative assessment of impact drawing on methodologies from Keeping Research Data Safe and more generally from economics and the social sciences.

An extract from the ESRC/ESDS press release of 24 July announcing the UK Data Service is as follows:

Continuing access to the most valuable collection of social and economic data in the UK has been secured with a £17 million investment over five years for the UK Data Service. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the new service is structured to support researchers in academia, business, third sector and all levels of government.

The new service, starting on 1 October 2012, will integrate the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS), the Census Programme, the Secure Data Service and other elements of the data service infrastructure currently provided by the ESRC, including the UK Data Archive.

The integration follows an economic evaluation of ESDS, which reveals that for every pound currently invested in data and infrastructure, the service returns £5.40 in net economic value to users and other stakeholders.

The UK Data Service will provide a unified point of access to the extensive range of high quality economic and social data, including valuable census data. It is designed to provide seamless access and support to meet the current and future research demands of both academic and non-academic users, and to help them maximise the impact of their work.

“The UK Data Service represents a significant step forward in our strategy,” says ESRC’s Chief Executive, Professor Paul Boyle. “As data are the lifeblood of research, our aim is to consolidate resources in a way that expands both the reach and impact of these vital investments. It will become a cornerstone for UK research; the place to go for high quality data and support.”

“Between our services we have an impressive collection of rich research data,” says Dr Matthew Woollard, director of the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) and the UK Data Archive. “We are dedicated to the reuse, sharing and archiving of data because we know the effect it can have on the wider society. Together, we look forward to becoming the UK Data Service so we can continue to build on these excellent data and services to generate even more impact.”

The full press release can be accessed here.

We are approaching the end of the company year for Charles Beagrie Ltd and this month we are celebrating our 10th year in business.

During 2011-2012 we undertook/supported 12 projects (16 if the DPC Technology Watch reports are counted individually).

As ever, the best part of the year has been working with a great group of company associates, partners, and staff at our clients. Thank you for marking the working year so enjoyable as well as productive!

We are pleased to announce that the  Digital Preservation Coalition is to offer its members a preview of the latest DPC Technology Watch Report ‘Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Preservation by Andrew Charlesworth of the University of Bristol. This is the third report in the DPC technology watch series to have been commissioned with Charles Beagrie Ltd as series editors.

‘While a number of legal issues colour contemporary approaches to, and practices of, digital preservation, it is arguable that intellectual property law, represented principally by copyright and its related rights, has been by far the most dominant, and often intractable, influence,’ explained Andrew Charlesworth.

‘It’s essential for those engaging in digital preservation to understand the letter of the law and to be able to identify and implement practical and pragmatic strategies for handling legal risks in the pursuit of preservation objectives. Moreover, those engaging in digital preservation need to advance a coherent and cogent message to rights holders, policymakers and the public with regard to the relationship between intellectual property law and digital preservation. It is in the long-term interests of all stakeholders that modern intellectual property law permits both the implementation of effective and efficient mechanisms of digital preservation.’

Two more reports – on Preservation, Trust and E-Journals, and Digital Forensics for Preservation – are now well advanced and a further batch are now in development.

The managing editor has been further supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who have commented on the text prior to release. The Editorial Board comprises William Kilbride (Chair), Neil Beagrie (Series Editor), Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth), Sarah Higgins (Archives and Records Association), Tim Keefe (Trinity College Dublin), Andrew McHugh (University of Glasgow), Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library).

The preview report is now online for DPC members:
• Login or register for the DPC site (DPC Members only)
• Download the preview report  (DPC Members only)

It will be available for general public release in the third quarter of 2012.

We are very pleased to announce that we will be providing consultancy support for the second stage sustainability and take-up phase of the BRISSkit service (www.brisskit.le.ac.uk). It was a pleasure for us working with colleagues at the University of Leicester and the Biomedical Cardiovascular Research Unit (LCBRU) at the NHS University Hospitals Leicester Trust in the first phase of the project. Our focus was on community engagement and the return on investment case for funding.

Further funding from JISC for the next stage of sustainability and take-up will now allow the project to consolidate the work to date and extend to two additional Biomedical Research Units within University Hospitals Leicester Trust (including the Institute for Lung Health Respiratory BRU & Lifestyle BRU) and to test the service with two external partners (UCL Institute of Child Health; and University of Birmingham School of Cancer Studies).

The Biomedical Research Infrastructure Software Service (BRISSkit) is led by the University of Leicester and will provide a suite of open source biomedical research database applications as secure web services in a browser. BRISSkit components may be hosted standalone or as integrated, cloud hosted solutions for researchers and clinicians, accessible via the UK JANET academic or NHS accredited networks. It will facilitate cohort discovery; making it easier for researchers to manage the identification, selection, engagement and recruitment of suitable subjects for research. Using internationally recognised data standards researchers and clinicians may then combine, query, visualise and output datasets. Components include:

•             contact management and patient recruitment

•             electronic clinical data capture

•             tissue sample management

•       research data combination and querying

The project partners are currently piloting these services with groups across the University Hospitals Leicester Trust and nationally, working with a range of technical partners and key stakeholders including JISC, HEFCE, JANET and the NHS National Institute for Health Research. For further information see the BRISSkit community website.

Research Data Management is very much in the news today with a lead article  in the Times Higher Education Supplement Seize the Data devoted to the issue and the release of the Royal Society Report Science as an Open Enterprise.

I was particularly pleased to see citation of our JISC funded research reports on Keeping Research Data Safe (pages 66-7) and the references to other major projects and programmes with which we have been involved such as Dryad and its sustainability and business case or the JISC Research Data Management Programme  in the Royal Society report.

Finally as the THES lead article notes one analysis of UK data equity estimated it to be worth £25.1 billion to British business in 2011. This is predicted to increase to £216 billion or 2.3 per cent of cumulative gross domestic product between 2012 and 2017. Although most of this is forecast to come from greater business efficiency in data use, £24 billion will stem from an increase in commercial data-driven R&D. The economic context alone draws attention to the huge importance of the issue, and in normal times would justify serious further investment in the science base.

We are very pleased to announce a new study and collaboration between Charles Beagrie Ltd and the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies University of Victoria (Prof John Houghton) on the impact of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) based at the University of York in the UK.

For more than fifteen years the ADS has been working to serve its users, both by acting as a long-term repository for valuable archaeological data and by providing open and free access to this data for research purposes. Its users, both those who deposit data and those who access it, come from all possible sectors of the archaeology discipline.

ADS regularly deal with data and data requests from academic archaeologists, local and national government archaeologists, the commercial sector, the community archaeology sector and, being an open archive, the general public. The ADS’s significance in the archaeological landscape has grown considerably in the last decade or so and with the use of access statistics and user feedback it has generally been easy for the ADS to demonstrate that it offers a valuable service to its users. However, it is a much more challenging proposition to find ways of analysing ADS usage that make a clear statement about the very important issue of how much economic impact that the ADS has on the sector. The new ADS Impact Study funded by JISC is intending to investigate in detail exactly this question and to give a clear indication of what the value of having a free to use and open access resource like the ADS is to the whole archaeological sector.

Engaging the expertise of Neil Beagrie of Charles Beagrie Ltd. and Professor John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) , the project will analyse and survey indicators and perceptions of the value of digital collections held by the ADS and how those indicators and perceptions of value can be measured. The CSES and Charles Beagrie Ltd have led the field in conducting value perception and economic impact surveys for digital repositories and they have recently completed a similar exercise with the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) in the UK.

A major element of the study will be two forms of stakeholder survey. The first phase will see a selection of users and depositors from all sectors be invited to participate in in-depth interviews, and secondly an online survey will be launched to gauge the levels of use, impacts, and perceptions of value amongst the broadest possible range of ADS users.

Our economic analysis aims to include a range of approaches, starting with the most immediate and direct measures of value that are likely to represent lower bound estimates of the value of ADS data and services and moving outwards to estimates of the wider economic benefits:

We hope this project will not only have immediate benefits for the ADS, its stakeholders and user communities, but will build on previous work to investigate methodologies and good practice in the area of valuation that will be directly applicable to other repositories, in different domains, allowing them to reap the benefits of this work as they seek to analyse their own economic impact. For further information on the ADS Impact study see the Project web site.

The Digital Preservation Coalition and Charles Beagrie Limited are delighted to announce a the continuation of their collaboration to produce 3 more Technology Watch Reports.

‘5 Technology Watch Reports have already been produced – or are in production – and have been enthusiastically received by our members’, said William Kilbride of the DPC. The next three will ensure that the production process continues through 2013 with themes and topics proposed and refined by DPC members to help them with digital preservation.’

The three new reports will be:
– Web Archiving, Maureen Pennock
– Preserving Computer Aided Design, Alex Ball (jointly with DCC)
– Preservation Metadata, Brian Lavoie and Richard Gartner

Two of the reports are completely new, and a third one will allow us to update one of the more popular reports that has become dated since it was first published in 2005. DPC members will have a period of privileged advance access to each report prior to wider public release.

The DPC Technology Watch Report series 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. Neil Beagrie, Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd, was commissioned to act as principal investigator and managing editor of the Technology Watch series in 2011.

‘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 Neil Beagrie, series editor. ‘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, Canada.’

‘We expect that these reports will have a wide readership. 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. Draft outlines of each reports will be distributed to DPC  members for comment and the whole process will be overseen by an editorial board drawn from the membership.

The Digital Preservation Coalition, Richard Wright and Charles Beagrie Ltd are delighted to announce the public release of the latest DPC Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound’, written by Richard Wright, formerly of the BBC.

‘Moving image and sound content is at great risk’, explained Richard Wright. ‘Surveys have shown that 74 per cent of professional collections are small: 5,000 hours or less. Such collections have a huge challenge if their holdings are to be preserved. About 85 per cent of sound and moving image content is still analogue, and in 2005 almost 100 per cent was still on shelves rather than being in files on mass storage. Surveys have also shown that in universities there is a major problem of material that is scattered, unidentified, undocumented and not under any form of preservation plan. These collection surveys are from Europe and North America because there is no survey of the situation in the UK, in itself a cause for concern.’

‘This report is for anyone with responsibility for collections of sound or moving image content and an interest in preservation of that content.’

‘New content is born digital, analogue audio and video need digitization to survive and film requires digitization for access. Consequently, digital preservation will be relevant over time to all these areas. The report concentrates on digitization, encoding, file formats and wrappers, use of compression, obsolescence and what to do about the particular digital preservation problems of sound and moving images.’

The report discusses issues of moving digital content from carriers (such as CD and DVD, digital videotape, DAT and minidisc) into files. This digital to digital ‘ripping’ of content is an area of digital preservation unique to the audio-visual world, and has unsolved problems of control of errors in the ripping and transfer process. It goes on to consider digital preservation of the content within the files that result from digitization or ripping, and the files that are born digital. While much of this preservation has problems and solutions in common with other content, there is a specific problem of preserving the quality of the digitized signal that is again unique to audio-visual content. Managing quality through cycles of ‘lossy’ encoding, decoding and reformatting is one major digital preservation challenge for audio-visual as are issues of managing embedded metadata.

DPC members have already had a preview. Pip Laurenson of Tate commented ‘This is a terrific report. Thank you so much for commissioning it – it is the best thing I have read on the subject.’

The report has also been subject to extensive review prior before publication. Oya Rieger and colleagues at Cornell University who reviewed the final draft welcomed the report: ‘It is a very thorough report. We realize that it was a challenging process to gather and organize all this information and present it in a succinct narrative. Another virtue of the report is that it incorporates both analog and digital media issues. The final section with conclusions and recommendation is very strong and provides an excellent summary.’

Another reviewer explained why the preview for DPC-members was so timely: ‘We are currently working on a grant proposal focusing on new media art and having access to the preserving moving pictures and sound report was very useful. The report provides a thorough characterization of the current practices, shortcomings, and challenges. Having access to the report has saved us from spending expensive time on conducting a literature review. ‘

DPC Technology Watch Reports identify, delineate, monitor and address topics that have major bearing on ensuring our collected digital memory will be available tomorrow. They provide an advanced introduction in order to support those charged with ensuring a robust digital memory and they are of general interest to a wide and international audience with interests in computing, information management, collections management and technology. The reports are commissioned after consultation with members; they are written by experts; and they are thoroughly scrutinised by peers before being released. The reports are informed, current, concise and balanced and they lower the barriers to participation in digital preservation. The reports are a distinctive and lasting contribution to the dissemination of good practice in digital preservation.

‘Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound’ is the second Technology Watch Report to be published by the DPC in association with Charles Beagrie Ltd. Neil Beagrie, Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd, was commissioned to act as principal investigator and managing editor of the series in 2011. The managing editor has been further supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who have commented on the text prior to release. The Editorial Board comprises William Kilbride (Chair), Neil Beagrie (Series Editor), Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth), Sarah Higgins (Archives and records Association), Tim Keefe (Trinity College Dublin), Andrew McHugh (University of Glasgow) and Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library).

The report is online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr12-01  (PDF 915KB)

I am delighted to announce that the second title in the new Technology Watch Reports Series that Charles Beagrie Ltd been producing for the Digital Preservation Coalition has just been released as a preview to DPC members.

The report ‘Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound’ is authored by Richard Wright, formerly of the BBC. It discusses issues of moving digital content from carriers (such as CD and DVD, digital videotape, DAT and minidisc) into files. This digital to digital ‘ripping’ of content is an area of digital preservation unique to the audio-visual world, and has unsolved problems of control of errors in the ripping and transfer process. It goes on to consider digital preservation of the content within the files that result from digitization or ripping, and the files that are born digital. While much of this preservation has problems and solutions in common with other content, there is a specific problem of preserving the quality of the digitized signal that is again unique to audio-visual content. Managing quality through cycles of ‘lossy’ encoding, decoding and reformatting is one major digital preservation challenge for audio-visual as are issues of managing embedded metadata.

Neil Beagrie, Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd, was commissioned to act as principal investigator and managing editor of the new series in 2011.  The managing editor has been further supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who have commented on the text prior to release.  The Editorial Board comprises William Kilbride (Chair), Neil Beagrie (Series Editor), Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth), Tim Keefe (Trinity College Dublin), Andrew McHugh (University of Glasgow), Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library).

The full text of the report is available now to DPC members (from the DPC member web pages – accessible by DPC members only) but it is expected to have its wider public release on the DPC website in April or early May 2012. The public release and url for the public version will be announced on release.