Beagrie.com

An update and review of the activity model published in the original Keeping Research Data Safe report has just been published on the KRDS2 project website.

All of our project partners undertook a detailed review of the activity model. The overall finding from this review was that the KRDS1 Activity Model was robust and broadly a good fit to their activities. Some changes were suggested for use in KRDS2, mainly to the wordings of definitions and edits to the existing text. In addition, three substantive changes or additions to activities were also identified by two or more reviewers and agreed as changes to the  model :

• The need to divide the “outreach and depositor support” sub-activity under Acquisition in the Archive phase.
• The need to divide the development of the archive’s Selection Policy and its application within the selection sub-activity of Acquisition.
• The need to cover staff training and development as a specific activity.

All proposed edits and revisions of the Activity Model can be downloaded here. The project team would welcome comment and feedback which can be sent to info@beagrie.com .

As a director of a small business I wasn’t overly impressed by measures to support businesses outlined today in the UK Pre-Budget Report.

However I was intrigued by an entry in the small print on the fiscal stimulus (government spending) at page 113 as follows:

“£442 million to accelerate support for around 25 capital projects to improve Further Education infrastructure and around 50 projects to improve facilities at Higher Education Institutions, and to bring forward development of scientific research facilities and improvements to university research infrastructure;”

It will be interesting to see the detail of this in due course from the UK Dept of Innovation, Universities, and Skills – a small boost (or at least bringing forward expenditure) for science and research infrastructure ?

An interesting development over the weekend with Microsoft announcing in a blog post that it is to shut down its book digitisation and live search book programme launched in 2005. The Live Search blog states:

“Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users. ”

It will be interesting to see the response and implications for Microsoft’s major library partners such as the British Library. The BL and Microsoft partnership was launched in November 2005 and aimed to digitise 100,000 books from the collection – the digitisation programme is still underway. Note Microsoft also “….intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.”