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I find it difficult to gauge the impact of different JISC studies other than ancedotally and as an author of JISC-funded reports I often wonder what the take-up has been, so I was intrigued to see a brief new section in the latest Autumn 2008 issue 23 of JISC Inform devoted to the Top five publications…

I understand from colleagues this represents a snapshot of the top five monthly downloads when Inform went to print (i.e. October 2008). Downloads probably peak during the first few months of publication so I have added month of publication as an additional factor/caveat in to the rankings which were as follows:

Top five publications..

1. What is Web 2.0? TechWatch report (March 2008)
2. Great expectations of ICT: JISC briefing paper (June 2008)
3. Keeping research data safe: Charles Beagrie report (May 2008)
4. Shibboleth – connecting people and resources: JISC briefing paper (March 2006)
5. Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (‘Google Generation report’): CIBER report (January 2008).

JISC is quite a large specialist publisher: there have been 28 JISC Reports and 24 JISC Briefing Papers published in 2008 alone so far, so there is stiff competition to get into the listings and I was chuffed to see Keeping Research Data Safe at No. 3.

It was even nicer to hear that the listings had a new Number 1 in November: the Digital Preservation Policies Study (October 2008) was the runaway no. 1 with over 2,500 downloads.

Christmas must have come early this year 🙂

My Google alerts have just drawn my attention to a review in the Caveat Lector Blog and hence flagged to me the publication by JISC of our recent study on Digital Preservation Policies. A bit more information on the study and links to the report follow below. Our aim was to help institutions and their staff develop appropriate digital preservation policies and clauses set in the context of broader institutional strategies so we hope colleagues will find a lot of value in the report.

A major business driver in all universities and colleges over the past decade has been harnessing digital content and electronic services and the undoubted benefits in terms of flexibility and increased productivity they can bring. The priority in recent years has been on developing e-strategies and infrastructure to underpin electronic access and services and to deliver those benefits. However any long-term access and future benefit may be heavily dependent on digital preservation strategies being in place and underpinned by relevant policy and procedures. This should now be an increasing area of focus in our universities.

The new study aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for Higher and Further Education Institutions. Although focussing on the UK Higher and Further Education sectors, the study draws widely on policy and implementations from other sectors and countries and will be of interest to those wishing to develop policy and justify investment in digital preservation within a wide range of institutions.

Two tools have been created in this study and can be downloaded as PDFs from the JISC website:

1) a model/framework for digital preservation policy and implementation clauses based on examination of existing digital preservation policies (main report);

2) a series of mappings of digital preservation to other key institutional strategies in UK universities and colleges including Research, Teaching and Learning, Information, Libraries, and Records Management (appendices to the main report).

I’m looking forward to catching up with many projects and individuals at the iPRES 2008 conference next week.

My colleague and associate consultant Najla Rettberg and I will be presenting on Monday morning recent work for JISC on digital preservation policies.

The study aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and in particular to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for Higher Education Institutions in areas such as research and teaching and learning.

Although focusing on the UK Higher Education sector, it draws widely on policy and implementations from other sectors and countries and we hope it will be of interest to those wishing to develop policy and justify investment in digital preservation within a wide range of institutions.

The study has been submitted to JISC and is in peer reiew. We hope it will be available from the JISC website in late October and I will post further details to the blog once it is available.

I am pleased to announce we have added an Associates and Partners web page to the Charles Beagrie website. We work with a range of associates and partners to form project teams for specific assignments and fulfil the needs of individual clients.

The company is fortunate to work with leading figures in the field of digital preservation, Higher Education and Scholarly Communication and the web page profiles some of our main associates and business partners. It is intended to give potential clients examples of the breadth and depth of experience and skills that the company can draw on through its directors and network of associates and partners.

I have previously blogged on UKRDS, the major consultancy work the company has been undertaking with ther lead partner SERCO Consulting over the last six months on a UK Research Data Service feasibility study for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

The interim report of the study has just been released. The report analyses the current situation in the UK with a detailed review of relevant literature and funders policies, and data drawn from four major case study universities (Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, and Oxford). It describes the emerging trends of local data repositories and national facilities in the UK and also looks internationally at Australia, the US and the EU. Finally it presents possible ways forward for UKRDS. Preliminary findings from a UKRDS survey of over 700 UK researchers are presented in an Appendix. The study has now moved into its second phase building on the interim report and developing the business case.

Luis Martinez-Uribe, Digital Repositories Research Co-ordinator at Oxford University has written on the interim report in his blog “I highly recommend everyone with an interest in research data management to have a look at this report as not only it captures the current state of affairs in the UK and elsewhere but also offers possible ways forward.”

The blog has been very quiet over August and the holidays. This is just a brief first entry (more to come next month) to flag up major consultancy work the company has been undertaking with SERCO Consulting over the last six months on a UK Research Data Service feasibility study for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

The study has been initiated and led by the consortium of Research Libraries in the UK and Ireland (RLUK) and the Russell Group [of UK Universities] IT Directors (RUGIT) and aims to assess the feasibility and costs of developing and maintaining a national shared digital research data service for UK Higher Education sector. There is more background information on the UKRDS website.

A major part of the study has involved a feasibility and requirements stage working with the universities of Bristol, Leeds, Leicester and Oxford to survey over 700 academics in disciplines across the universities on their research data use and requirements. You will find further information on the Oxford results on the Oxford Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management Project website. Further information on the overall survey and findings will be available soon and a link and commentary will be posted on the blog.

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, JISCs 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.

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.