Beagrie.com

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
—————————
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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.