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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 🙂

The Alliance for Permanent Access has just completed its annual conference (Budapest, 4 November) : this year the theme was the economics of archiving scientific data.

The Alliance’s international membership includes strategic partners from the research community, libraries, publishers, and digital preservation organisations. Participants called upon the Alliance to act as an umbrella organisation to secure sustainable funding for permanent access in Europe.

A comprehensive conference report (complete with photographs conveying the atmosphere!), together with the powerpoint presentations, abstracts and authors biographies is now available online.

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 was at the Oxford Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop yesterday.

One of the many facts and updates that caught my eye was a reference in Natasha Balac’s presentation to the IDC’s Expanding Digital Universe forecasts of worldwide information growth (which seem to have been inspired by earlier work on How Much Information done at Berkeley in 2000 and 2003).

A bit of further research today located the first forecast to 2010 (published in 2007) and the latest updated forecast taking this to 2011 (published this year).

There is a lot for anyone interested in information management in these forecasts: I was particularly taken by the fact that 2007 was the “crossover year” when for the first time information generated worldwide exceeded available data storage (think of all those digital camera or mobile images or experimental research and observational data). From now on it is projected we will never have enough storage space for the digital information we produce. Of course no-one should want to keep everything but from now on selection of what we keep digitally will be a necessity.

There is also some thoughtful information on your “digital shadow” – the information on you generated everyday by Web and financial transaction, CCTV, etc as well as on personal information management (stuff generated directly by individuals).

It is best to read both forecasts in sequence as the first report is the most extensive: there is even discussion of digital preservation in the first forecast to 2010. Enjoy.

I have been reading through the report of a recent (July 2008) survey investigating preservation strategies amongst members of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). It makes interesting reading and overall is a very worthwhile report. The report is available as a free pdf download from the ALPSP website.

The responses came from 68 publishers out of a total ALPSP membership of 240 (just over 23%) so results need to be treated with some caution and the respondents may be less representative than a true sample.

Key Findings were:

1. The majority of ALPSP publishers who responded to the survey believe long-term preservation to be a critical issue: 91% either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Long-term preservation is an issue which urgently needs to be addressed within the industry.” 9% were neutral; no-one disagreed.

2. ALPSP publishers are strongly motivated to engage with preservation because of its critical importance to their customers, with over 90% of respondents citing this as a major motivating factor: a heartening response for those in the library community.

3. Although 68% of publishers reported understanding of preservation issues within their organisation to be either ‘good’ or ‘reasonable’, the survey also revealed a wide range of concerns suggesting an overall lack of confidence, at least for the present. The survey revealed a strong desire amongst almost all publishers for the development of ‘best practice’ and industry standards.

4. There is some confusion surrounding the nature and extent of publisher participation in long-term preservation schemes, with high numbers of respondents declaring their organisation to be participating in one or more initiatives and yet the schemes themselves reporting substantially lower numbers presently taking part.

5. Publisher views on who should take responsibility for long-term preservation also reveal some interesting contradictions: despite presently supporting a range of preservation schemes, a significant majority of publishers indicated they would in fact prefer other groups and institutions to take this responsibility on. National libraries in particular were a popular choice.

6. Finally, the survey revealed most publishers are clear about the distinction between ensuring long-term access and ensuring long-term preservation, with the majority believing they have clear responsibility for long-term access. A worryingly high number however admit to either not trusting their present strategy or not currently having any strategy to deliver here.

Issus which particularly struck me were:

Key finding 4 – the high number of publishers (77%) who thought they were participating in one or more preservation schemes but in fact were/had been involved in time-limited trials which had lapsed, etc. The reality check showed the need to clarify which schemes publishers are truly and fully supporting.

Key findings 5 and 6 – there is still lack of clarity and understanding of digital preservation in terms of continuing/perpetual access (archiving guarantees and ongoing access rights of subscribers to paid content) and legal deposit (public good archiving for the long-term with limited access rights for non-subscribers). The issues can overlap in some services being offered by national libraries and both are “digital preservation” but the different user groups and rights mean it is helpful for them to be distinguished.

Perhaps a final key finding that could be added is that there is a significant and urgent opportunity to work with publishers on developing digital preservation strategies and practice. Whilst a majority of ALPSP publishers in the survey feel they have a responsibility for long-term (continuing/perpetual) access a substantial number do not have strategies in place to support this. The report suggests a strong need for an industry-wide working group, perhaps modelled on project COUNTER or project TRANSFER, through which publishers, librarians, preservation organisations and intermediaries, can map out the road ahead for digital preservation. The urgency is underlined by the fact that 75% of the respondents concurred with the survey statement question that “It is inevitable that, at some point in the future, access to some scholarly e-journals will be permanently lost due to a lack of preservatrion strategy”.

The iPRES 2008 conference finished on Tuesday 30th September and has been fairly comprehensively reported by Chris Rusbridge in the digital curation blog.

I would like to pull out a couple of papers which were particular highlights for me in the programme: namely two Web-archiving projects, the JISC Funded POWR project and The National Archive (TNA)’ s Web Continuity Project.

POWR was the subject of an excellent presentation and paper by Brian Kelly which you can access on the UKOLN website. It gave examples of making the case for Web archiving within universities and its findings fitted extremely well with our own iPRES 2008 presentation of the Charles Beagrie work for JISC on Digital Preservation Policies and their implementation. Partners in the POWR project are UKOLN and ULCC and you can find further information and a draft Handbook on the POWR Project Blog.

The Web Continuity Project was another impressive iPRES paper from TNA (it could well be a hot betting favourite to complete a future TNA hat-trick of Digital Preservation Awards). The presentation pointed to the problems being encountered in Hansard (the official record of debates in the UK Parliament). Action had been requested by Jack Straw leader of the House of Commons when it was discovered that 60% of links in Hansard to UK Government electronic documents or webpages on websites for the period 1997 to 2006 were broken. The Web Continuity Project is an imaginative response from TNA using re-direction of failed searches to relevant pages in the TNA’s Web Archive of Government websites – the service developed by the project will go live in November.

The Guardian Newspaper on Tuesday this week (30th September) devoted an editorial to digital preservation and the iPRES 2008 conference in London. The editorial “In praise of…preserving digital memories” is also available on the online version of the paper.

A short extract as follows:

“It ought to be reassuring that while governments are living a day-to-day existence trying to prevent a global financial implosion, some people are thinking centuries ahead. The British Library is hosting a conference of more than 250 experts from 33 countries to work out ways of preserving for future generations the huge amounts of data we store online. Since practically everything we write or watch these days is in digital form – from newspapers or state documents, to the minutes of the banking crisis or the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto – this is a task of mind-boggling proportions…. This won’t cure the banking crisis, but it will enable people in future centuries to understand it better. If all goes well, we will have the capacity to preserve as many of our memories, personal and national, as we want. Only time will tell whether these will last as long as the Rosetta Stone.”

With thanks to Najla Rettberg for drawing the editorial to my attention.

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 have been tracking national research initiatives in Australia, Canada, UK and USA in various blogs over previous months. Another potentially very important national initiative can now be added to the list from Germany.

An alliance of scientific organisations in Germany which includes all the majors players such as Deutsche Forschungsgemeinshaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation), Fraunhofer Society, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and the Max Planck Society, have signed a joint national e-infrastructure policy initiative with six priority areas focusing on:

• National licencing of e-journals;
• Open Access;
• National hosting strategy for preservation of e-journals;
• Preservation and re-use of primary research data;
• Virtual research environments; and
• Legal frameworks (focusing on copyright law and equalising VAT treatment on print and electronic publications).

The Alliance agreed to coordinate the activities of the individual partner organisations and to expand on the ideal of the innovative information environment by means of a Joint Priority Initiative from 2008 to 2012 with the following goals:

• to guarantee the broadest possible access to digital publications, digital data and other source materials;
• to utilise digital media to create the ideal conditions for the distribution and reception of publications related to German research;
• to ensure the long-term availability of the digital media and contents that have been acquired from round the world and their integration in the digital research environment;
• to support collaborative research by means of innovative information technologies.

Further information on the initiative is now available to download as a PDF in English or you can brush up your language skills (as I did or at least tried to) and read it in the original German 🙂

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.