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I’m busy preparing with project colleagues for the dissemination workshop for the JISC  Digital Preservation Benefits Analysis Tools project in London on Tuesday.

The Toolkit is nearing its final version and we are adding case studies and worked examples ready for online release at the end of this month.

For those looking for an early taster (and not attending the workshop), here is a quick preview:

The Toolkit consists of two tools: the KRDS Benefits Framework (now in public version 3); and the Value-chain and Benefits Impact tool (now in public version 2). Each tool consists of a more detailed guide and worksheet(s). Both tools have drawn on partner case studies and previous work on benefits and impact for digital curation/preservation. This experience has provided a series of common examples of generic benefits that are employed in both tools for users to modify or add to as required.

It is designed for use by a wide audience including funders, researchers and project staff, and personnel in university central services, data archives and repositories.

I think the project has moved the usability of the KRDS Benefits Framework and the Value-chain and Impact tool on immensely from their early research project roots. Hopefully both existing and new users will find the new Toolkit a big improvement and valuable in their day to day work.

We will announce its release when finalised at the end of July via various email lists and this blog.

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the workshop to disseminate the Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Toolset and accompanying materials such as user guides and factsheets to the research community.

Workshop registration is free but please note that places are limited and early registration is advised. Further details of the workshop are as follows:

12.30 -16.00 Tuesday 12th July, 2011 South Bank University, Central London

Programme:
12.30 – 13.15 Registration and buffet lunch
13.15 – 13.25 Welcome and Project Background (Liz Lyon UKOLN)
13.25 – 13.55 The Toolset (Neil Beagrie, Charles Beagrie Ltd)
13.55 – 14.50 Disciplinary Test Sites and Applications (chair Manjula Patel UKOLN)

• Dipak Kalra (Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education at UCL)
• Matthew Woollard (UK Data Archive University of Essex)
• Liz Lyon and Monica Duke (SageCite Project)
• Catherine Hardman (Archaeology Data Service)

14.50 – 15.00 Implications for Funders (Neil Beagrie)
15.00 – 15.20 Break and refreshments
15.20 – 16.00 Plenary Discussion and Questions (chair Liz Lyon, UKOLN)
16.00 Close
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Background

The “Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools” project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and runs from 1st February to 31 July 2011.

The project has tested and reviewed the combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Framework and the Value Chain and Impact Analysis tool, which were first applied in the I2S2 project for assessing the benefits and impact of digital preservation of research data. We have extended their utility to, and adoption within, the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation.

The project plan is on the project website and the project outputs will be available from the website during the summer.

The project partners are UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Bath,the Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education (CHIME) at University College London , the UK Data Archive (University of Essex), the Archaeology Data Service (University of York), OCLC Research, and Charles Beagrie Limited.

The Digital Preservation Coalition and Charles Beagrie Limited are delighted to announce a collaboration to produce 5 new DPC Technology Watch Reports. The collaboration follows a DPC call for proposals issued in December last year and selection of Charles Beagrie Limited as the preferred bidder.

The collaboration will produce a series of 5 Technology Watch Reports over the next 12 months under the general supervision of an editorial board and Neil Beagrie as principal investigator and commissioning editor. The 5 proposed reports and their authors are as follows:

• Preserving Email, Chris Prom
• Preserving Moving Picture and Sound, Richard Wright
• Intellectual Property Rights for Preservation, Andrew Charlesworth
• Digital Forensics and Preservation, Jeremy Leighton John
• Trust in Post Cancellation Access Services, Neil Beagrie

The DPC is establishing an editorial board for the series. It will be chaired by William Kilbride, Executive Director of the DPC.

The collaboration represents an exciting new development for the DPC and Charles Beagrie Ltd and the opportunity is being taken to re-vamp the design and layout of the new series. Content outlines for individual reports will be shared with DPC members and shaped by their needs and requirements. DPC members will have a period of privileged advance access to each report prior to wider public release.

The DPC Technology Watch Report series was established in 2002 and 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.

‘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 William Kilbride of the DPC.  ‘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, and Canada.’

‘We expect that these reports will have a wide readership,’ explained Neil Beagrie, the commissioning editor.  ‘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 of the next 12 months to DPC members and the wider community.  The draft outline of contents for the first report – Preserving Email – has already been compiled and will be distributed shortly.

• To find out more about the DPC and its Technology Watch series, including the current ones in the set, see: http://www.dpconline.org/advice/technology-watch-reports
• For more about Charles Beagrie Ltd, see: http://www.beagrie.com/

There was a 6 minute interview on digital preservation and personal digital archives on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme at 8.21 am UK time this morning with Richard Ovenden (chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition), John Sutherland of UCL, and John Humphries of the BBC. The discussion did feel a bit weak in places and the researcher input to the discussion perhaps could have been balanced with input from someone active in the digital humanities but it was still interesting to hear and the digital library/archive case is well put by Richard Ovenden. You can now listen to a recording of the discussion online.

The official description of the broadcast is as follows: The poet Wendy Cope has sold her archive to the British Library for £32,000, a bounty that includes everything from letters, diaries and drafts to more than 40,000 emails.John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, and Richard Ovenden, of the Bodleian Library, consider whether emails really denote a digital form of art, and what impact the email will have for future literary research.

Projects from the JISC Managing Research Data Programme were involved in a Parallel Session at the annual JISC Conference on Tuesday this week.

Entitled ‘The benefits of more effective research data management in UK Universities’, the session explained how projects have been developing ‘Benefits Case Studies’  with support from Charles Beagrie Ltd to provide evidence of the positive effects of improvements which they have engineered.  The case studies provide significant indications of improved research efficiency through more effective research data management.  The case studies will be synthesised in a report by Neil Beagrie due for release in May.

Presentations from the parallel session are available online at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11/programme/1researchdata.aspx

They are best perused in the following order:

Simon Hodson, JISCMRD, Introduction
Neil Beagrie, Cost-Benefits and Business Cases Support Role
Manjula Patel and Neil Beagrie, I2S2 Project, UKOLN, University of Bath
June Finch, MaDAM Project, University of Manchester
Jonathan Tedds, HALOGEN Project, University of Leicester

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new project focussing on development of a digital preservation benefits analysis toolset.

The “Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools” project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and will run from 1^st February to 31 July 2011.

The project  aims to test, review and promote combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Taxonomy and the Value Chain and Impact Analysis tool first applied in the I2S2 project  for assessing the benefits and impact of digital preservation of research data. We will extend their utility to and adoption within the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation. We will demonstrate and critique the tools, and then create and disseminate the toolset and accompanying materials such as User Guides and Factsheets to the wider community.

A project website is at http://beagrie.com/krds-i2s2.php and the project plan and project outputs will be available from the website in due course. A dissemination event to mark the conclusion of the project will be held in central London on 12 July 2011 (further details and registration will be announced in May).

The project partners are UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Bath, the Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education (CHIME) at University College London , the UK Data Archive (University of Essex), the Archaeology Data Service(University of York),  OCLC Research, and  Charles Beagrie Limited.

Ever since a Digital Lives seminar at the British Library earlier this year previewed some of the work, I’ve been looking forward to the publication of this CLIR report on digital forensics and the cultural heritage.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has now published the report, Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriela Redwine.

Digital forensics was once specialised to fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defence, but because most records today are born digital, libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media-and sometimes entire computers-as part of their acquisition of “papers.” Staff at these institutions face challenges such as accessing and preserving legacy formats, recovering data, ensuring authenticity, and maintaining trust. The methods and tools that forensics experts have developed can be useful in meeting these challenges. For example, the same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect’s hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession.

The report introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting and maintaining legal evidence.

Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections is now available electronically at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub149abst.html. Print copies will be available in January for ordering through CLIR’s Web site, for $25 per copy plus shipping and handling.

I’ve downloaded the electronic edition but have yet to read it (that’s part of  my Xmas reading sorted) but if the seminar is anything to go by it will be a great contribution to the emerging field on personal digital collections and the curation of digital heritage.

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.

The JISCMail Digital Preservation list passes a significant milestone this month – its 10th birthday and there is a lead item on the anniversary in the November issue of the JISCMail Newsletter . Today there are some 1300 subscribers in over 30 countries.

The first message was posted on 13th November 2000 and there have been many thousands of postings since then. Just for fun some randomly selected events from the archives of the last 10 years:

• 2000 In December 2000, US Congress appropriated $100 million for NDIIPP.
• 2002 In February of 2002 a newly formed Digital Preservation Coalition in the United Kingdom addressed the House of Commons about the importance of considering long term digital preservation.
• 2004 The Digital Curation Centre had its public launch in November 2004.
• 2005 First Digital Preservation Award presented at the British Museum on 22 November 2005.
• 2006 In August 2006, the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation.
• 2008 The Guardian Newspaper on Tuesday 30th September devoted an editorial “In praise of…preserving digital memories” to digital preservation and the iPRES 2008 conference in London.

Dear all

A quick reminder to anyone wishing to respond to the JISC consultation on the draft e-Journal Archiving White paper that the deadline for comments is the end of next week (Friday 12 November).

Details of the consultation and the draft white paper are available here.