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On 16 September 2010 a rather unique meeting sponsored by NCDD/DEN/and the KB took place in The Hague: the experts from five past and present projects on cost modelling for digital preservation came together to exchange information and discuss future possibilities for international cooperation.

The conference report by Inge Angevaare of this meeting with photographs and a summary of existing costing models is now available. Those who know Inge well will be aware that a camera is never very far away so the report is beautifully illustrated, concise and well worth reading.

The projects discussed included Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS, UK), CMDP (Denmark),LIFE3 (UK), DANS (Netherlands), National Archives Testbed (Netherlands). For those wanting to see more detail of individual presentations they are available here.

Libraries are facing increasing space pressures and funding constraints. There is a growing interest in wherever possible moving more rapidly to e-only provision of academic journals to help alleviate these pressures as well as to provide new electronic services to users.

One of the most cited barriers and concerns both from library and faculty staff to moving to e-only has been sustaining and assuring long-term access to electronic content.

Today JISC has released a consultation draft of a White Paper on e-Journal Archiving for UK Higher Education Libraries (prepared for JISC by Charles Beagrie Ltd). The consultation on the draft white paper is open until 12 November.

Although focussing on the UK sector, many of the economic and emerging best practice issues it addresses will also be of interest to university libraries and research institutions in other countries.

The white paper complements and references other advice and guidance available from JISC on e-journal archiving, in particular A Practical Guide to e-journal Archiving Solutions published in February 2010, which gives a detailed and impartial evaluation of the UK LOCKSS Alliance, CLOCKSS and Portico.

The white paper therefore is primarily focussing on areas not previously covered in JISC guidance, in particular outlining emerging good practice in terms of policy and procedures for institutions and drawing together the economic case for e-journal archiving.

The economic case explores the benefits arising from transitioning from print or print+electronic to electronic-only for current journal licensing; and benefits arising from the purchase or licensing of past electronic issues and/or retro-digitised versions of historic print journals.

The white paper also includes four emerging good practice case studies from the libraries of:

• University of Glasgow
• University of Huddersfield
• London School of Economics
• and the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL)

These were selected to provide a range of emerging UK good practice in large research universities, small-medium scale universities, specialist research universities, and innovative collegiate shared licensing and resource development.

Related Blog Posts

For those interested in the topic of e-journal archiving and licensing electronic content, there are a number of related posts on this blog covering some of our previous work in this field including:

A practical guide to e-journal archiving solutions

Ensuring Perpetual Access – German National Hosting Strategy for electronic resources

and Just published: A Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions

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.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) have released the report Survey of Digital Preservation Practices in Canada, which presents the result of a survey the LAC commissioned in 2008 and completed in 2009.

The survey received 61 full responses from a variety of types of organisations: libraries, archives government departments/agencies, museums, research institutes, across a number of sectors: academic, governments and not-for profit. Although invitations were sent to several organizations in private industry, no responses were received from this sector.

The survey found that 72% of respondents are involved in some aspects related to digital preservation. Offsite storage was the most commonly cited practice in use, followed by activities that address the decay or obsolescence of storage media, including refreshing, bitstream copying and replication.

Digital preservation practices that address the understandability of the digital object (format/software obsolescence), such as migration or emulation are less widespread, even amongst those repositories that have a formal mandate to preserve. As well, only a few repositories are employing the types of  extensive metadata schemas needed for long-term preservation, such as PREMIS.

The majority of repositories in the survey are applying some basic integrity measurements (virus check, format verification, checksum verification, format validation) but other methods for establishing authenticity and trust in digital repositories, such as through the use of persistent identifiers and audit trails for digital objects are not well established.

There are also numerous other challenges for repositories beyond the most obvious technical ones, in particular around funding/staffing and expertise.

The report concludes digital preservation presents significant challenges; and given the growing volume and complexity of digital information it will continue to do so in the future. It suggests one way to assist Canadian organisations with these challenges would be to establish a central entity in Canada that can provide leadership in this area.

The European Archive are organising a Web Archiving Training Session on 14th and 15th of October 2010 in Paris.

The training will cover all aspects of Web Archiving for librarians, archivists as well as technicians in charge of web archiving. Special attention will be given to providing the necessary background on Internet technologies in general and Web publishing in particular to understand the media and requirements for its preservation.

Registration fees for the 2 days (including lunches and coffee breaks)are 750€ standard rate or 580€ for non-profit and governmental organisations.

The New Zealand Government has announced the merger of Archives New Zealand, the National Library and the Department of Internal Affairs and new funding of £5.9 million pounds (NZ$12.6 million) to create a digital archive for New Zealand.

Announcing the new funding and the merger, the Minister responsible for all three agencies, Guy Hands believes they share natural synergies, a common focus on using digital technology, and making public information widely accessible to citizens through the internet. This move will allow expertise and resources to be pooled, while at the same time sharing back office costs. All savings generated by this project will be redirected into better frontline services for the public.

The New Zealand Government is also allocating £5.9 million pounds (NZ$12.6 million) of new money to Archives New Zealand and the National Library over the next four years to develop and implement a full-scale industrial-strength digital archive. The new archive will utilise Archive’s New Zealand’s existing infrastructure and build on functions developed for the National Library’s National Digital Heritage Archive.

A public announcement about the Government Digital Archive and was made at the Government Recordkeeping Forum held in Wellington on Tuesday 1 June.

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.

I am pleased to announce that our study Ensuring Perpetual Access: establishing a federated strategy on perpetual access and hosting of electronic resources for Germany is now available.

Concepts and Properties of Archives and Hosting in the Strategy and their Relationships ©Charles Beagrie Ltd 2009. CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike3.0 Key: solid colour represents core properties and fading colour represents weaker properties of archives and hosting services.

The study was commissioned by the Alliance of German Science Organisations to help develop a strategy to address the challenges of perpetual access and hosting of electronic resources. In undertaking the study we were requested to focus on commercial e-journals and retro-digitised material.

Although developed for Germany, there is substantial discussion and recommendations around the issues of perpetual access, archiving, and sustainability of hosting and access services for these materials which will be of interest to an international audience.

Contents include:

• Discussion, definition, and glossary of terms;
• Review of relevant  international activity;
• Review of current and future desired position in Germany;
• Gap analysis;
• A series of use cases;
• Scenarios, potential solutions, and recommendations

Model used for discussion of the Federated Strategy on Perpetual Access and Hosting of Electronic Resources for Germany  ©Charles Beagrie Ltd 2009. CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike3.0

The members of the Alliance of German Science Organisations are the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Rectors’ Conference (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz – HRK), the Helmholtz Association, the Leibniz Association, the Max Planck Society, and the Wissenschaftsrat (German Council of Science and Humanities). For further information on the Alliance Hosting Working Group that steered the study see:

English webpage:

http://www.allianzinitiative.de/en/core_activities/national_hosting_strategy/working_group/

Deutsch:

http://www.allianzinitiative.de/de/handlungsfelder/nationale_hosting_strategie/arbeitsgruppe/

The Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access is now available.  The report Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information describes its work as follows:

“…questions remain about what digital information we should preserve, who is responsible for preserving, and who will pay.

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access investigated these questions from an economic perspective. In this report, we identify problems intrinsic to all preserved digital materials, and propose actions that stakeholders can take to meet these challenges to sustainability. We developed action agendas that are targeted to major stakeholder groups and to domain-specific preservation strategies.

The Task Force focused its inquiry on materials that are of long-term public interest, looking at four content domains with diverse preservation profiles:

• Scholarly discourse: the published output of scholarly inquiry
• Research data: the primary inputs into research, as well as the first-order results of that research
• Commercially owned cultural content: culturally significant digital content that is owned by a private entity and is under copyright protection; and
• Collectively produced Web content: Web content that is created interactively, the result of collaboration and contributions by consumers.”

I have not had chance to look at the report in detail but hope to add a short commentary to the blog in due course.