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I am pleased to announce the release of a new User Guide from the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) project on the costs and benefits of digital preservation of research data. This is the second and final work of synthesis from the project. The User Guide is available for download as a PDF from here.

The KRDS User Guide has been developed to support easier assimilation of the combined work of the KRDS1 and KRDS2 projects by those wishing to implement the tools or key findings.

KRDS is a cost framework that can be used to develop and apply local cost models for research data management and long-term preservation. In addition, it includes a Benefits Taxonomy and discussion of benefits which provides a valuable starting point and framework for assessing the impact and benefits of research data management and preservation activities. Finally, KRDS has been a significant research project establishing many key “rules of thumb” for digital preservation costs and approaches to sustaining digital research data. Even those who do not wish to or cannot allocate the resources to develop local models based on KRDS are likely to benefit from its key findings and exemplars, covered in later sections of the Guide.

The Use Guide consists of 39 A4 pages with 15 illustrations (many created specifically for this Guide) and covers the following major areas:

The KRDS Costs Framework;

A Brief “How To” Guide For Life-Cycle Cost Analysis;

KRDS Benefits Analysis;

KRDS Case Studies, Costs Survey, and Factsheet;

Future Development of KRDS.

We hope the User Guide will be of value to the digital preservation and research data communities. In addition to the User Guide we have created the new KRDS webpage which provides a single point of access for the key outputs of both the KRDS1 and KRDS2 projects (including the two recent works of synthesis the KRDS User Guide and the KRDS Factsheet).

The Keeping Research Data Safe studies have been conducted by a partnership of the following institutions: Charles Beagrie Ltd, OCLC Research, the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service, the University of London Computer Centre, and the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Oxford and Southampton. The creation of the Guide has been funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme.

We welcome feedback from users of the Guide which will help enhance and update future editions.

Charles Beagrie Limited are pleased to be partners in the DryadUK project which launched earlier this month. DryadUK is a JISC-funded project being run from the British Library and Oxford University, with assistance from NESCent, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), ourselves, and the Research Information Network (RIN).

The project is assisting the further development of Dryad in the following ways:

Expanding Dryad

• By establishing a UK mirror site
• By expanding the service to include new publishers, journals and disciplines

Increasing Dryad sustainability

• By developing a sustainable business plan
• By establishing a framework for evaluating Dryad data usage

Adding value

• Exploring ways to improve metadata standards for deposition, citation and annotation
• Adding usage of DataCite dois.

For further information see the DryadUK webpages.

I’ve just looked at our webstats  and the Keeping Research Data Safe Factsheet has  had over 2,000 downloads in its first week of publication. A lot of work went into its development so it is great to see that level of interest.

I am pleased to announce the release of a new Factsheet from the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) project on the costs and benefits of digital preservation. The Factsheet is being made available for download as a PDF file.

If you are attending the  iPRES 2010 conference in Vienna next week there will also be print copies available on the JISC stand.

The A4 four-page factsheet is intended to be suitable for senior managers and others interested in a concise summary of  our key findings. It will be relevant to all repositories and institutions holding digital material but of particular interest to anyone responsible for or involved in the long-term management of research data.

The factsheet covers the following major areas:

• Cost issues in digital preservation (what costs most, impact of fixed costs, declining costs over time)
• Benefits from digital preservation (benefits taxonomy, direct benefits, indirect benefits, near-term benefits, long-term benefits)
• Institutional issues (repository models and structures, key cost variables, data collection levels)

We hope the Factsheet will be of value to the digital preservation and research data communities and plan to release a further KRDS publication later this year (a KRDS User Guide).

The Keeping Research Data Safe studies have been funded by JISC and conducted by a partnership of the following institutions: Charles Beagrie Ltd, OCLC Research, the UK Data Archive, the Archaeology Data Service, the University of London Computer Centre, and the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Oxford and Southampton.

The US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has recently awarded 38 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants totalling $22,623,984.

Amongst the awards list I was struck by the following:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Champaign, IL : Project Title: “Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC)”

Award Amount: $988,543; Matching: $179,822

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have partnered to establish Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC). DCERC will develop a model, including a field experience in a data intensive scientific environment, for educating LIS master’s and doctoral students in data curation. It will implement a graduate research and education program to address the need for professionals with scientific expertise who can manage and curate large digital data collections. Six doctoral students will benefit from this project.

Purdue University – West Lafayette, IN: Project Title: “Understanding Curation through the use of Data Curation Profiles”

Award Amount: $187,242; Matching: $104,868

Purdue University will create a series of workshops to expand the expertise of academic librarians about data curation issues. The needs of researchers and data producers are changing radically because of the disruptive effects of technology on research and its dissemination. This continuing education program will teach an estimated 370 librarians to be more effective data curators.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – Chapel Hill, NC: Project Title: “Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 3 (WILIS 3): Sustaining the Career Tracking Model through Data sharing”

Award Amount: $298,385; Matching: $85,637

The School of Information and Library Science, the Institute on Aging, and the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will collaborate to document the process of data archiving and sharing. The major aims of the WILIS 3 project are to create publicly accessible de-identified datasets; to develop an interactive program-specific data system to enable library and information science programs to explore their own data and benchmark with other programs; and to produce a data archiving toolkit for use by other researchers.

And in UK/European Library and Information schools we have…….???

Zoe Locke, Lead Technologist at the UK Technology Strategy Board has made an interesting post Impact of Data to their blog requesting any information on the economic impact of research data sharing. Extract as follows:

“I am currently in Manchester attending a JISC workshop on Managing Research Data…

Yesterday, there was an interesting keynote speech from the Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).  However, I noted that ‘Impact’ was the 3rd reason for why researchers should care about data curation.  I asked about the meaning of impact.  In the context of the talk, impact was about whether or not the research for which the data was used got published (and had an effect on the researcher’s career).  The DCC focuses on transferring knowledge on curation into and around the higher education sector so this seems like an appropriate definition of impact.  However, given the potential socio-economic impact of research and resultant data, not to mention the business opportunities it could create (though we don’t really know where or what these are, let alone how big they might be), I can’t help feeling that we need to widen the definition to stimulate greater sharing and exploitation of data.  If businesses could generate wealth or increase the quality of life with this data then surely it would be easier for anyone to justify footing the bill for curation…

Does anyone out there have any specific case studies of money being made or saved through the exploitation of research data (specifically that data generated in a different organisation to the one exploiting it)?”

You will need to register with the Connect Network to post a reply to Zoe direct but I am happy to forward any examples readers may add as comments to this posting on the Charles Beagrie blog.

I am pleased to announce that the final report for Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) is now available from the JISC website. This KRDS2 study report presents the results of a survey of available cost information, validation and further development of the KRDS activity cost model, and a new taxonomy to help assess benefits alongside costs.

KRDS2 has delivered the following:

• A survey of cost information for digital preservation, collating and making available 13 survey responses for different cost datasets;

• The KRDS activity model has been reviewed and its presentation and usability enhanced;

• Cost information for four organisations (the Archaeology Data Service; National Digital Archive of Datasets; UK Data Archive; and University of Oxford) has been analysed in depth and presented in case studies;

• A benefits framework has been produced and illustrated with two benefit case studies from the National Crystallography Service at Southampton University and the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex.

One of the key findings on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data was that the cost of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) is consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all the case studies in KRDS2. As an example the respective activity staff costs for the Archaeology Data Service are Access (c.31%), Outreach/Acquisition/Ingest (c.55%), Archiving (c.15%).This confirms and supports a preliminary finding in KRDS1.

A range of supplementary materials in support of this report have also been made available on the KRDS project website. This includes the ULCC Excel Cost Spreadsheet for the NDAD service together with a Guide to Interpreting and Using the NDAD Cost Spreadsheet. The NDAD Cost Spreadsheet has previously been used as an exercise in digital preservation training events and may be particularly useful in training covering digital preservation costs. The accompanying Guide provides guidance to those wishing to understand and experiment with the spreadsheet.

During the May  meeting of the National Science Board, National Science Foundation (NSF) officials announced a change in the implementation of the existing policy on sharing research data. In particular, on or around October, 2010, NSF is planning to require that all proposals include a data management plan in the form of a two-page supplementary document. The research community will be informed of the specifics of the anticipated changes and the agency’s expectations.

The changes are designed to address trends and needs in the modern era of data-driven science. Ed Seidel, acting assistant director for NSF’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences directorate acknowledged that each discipline has its own culture about data-sharing, and said that NSF wants to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to the issue. But for all disciplines, the data management plans will be subject to peer review, and the new approach will allow flexibility at the directorate and division levels to tailor implementation as appropriate.

Full details can be found in the NSF press release.

Data Management Plans are also required by a growing number of research funders in the UK. The Digital Curation Centre provides a useful overview of current UK funder requirements for data management and sharing plans and a Data Management Plan Content Checklist.

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.