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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 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.

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 previously blogged on UKRDS, the major consultancy work the company has been undertaking with ther lead partner 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 interim report of the study has just been released. The report analyses the current situation in the UK with a detailed review of relevant literature and funders policies, and data drawn from four major case study universities (Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, and Oxford). It describes the emerging trends of local data repositories and national facilities in the UK and also looks internationally at Australia, the US and the EU. Finally it presents possible ways forward for UKRDS. Preliminary findings from a UKRDS survey of over 700 UK researchers are presented in an Appendix. The study has now moved into its second phase building on the interim report and developing the business case.

Luis Martinez-Uribe, Digital Repositories Research Co-ordinator at Oxford University has written on the interim report in his blog “I highly recommend everyone with an interest in research data management to have a look at this report as not only it captures the current state of affairs in the UK and elsewhere but also offers possible ways forward.”

Readers of the blog may be interested in work underway in Canada via Research Data Canada which is running in parallel to work on UKRDS here in the UK, Datanets in the USA, and ANDS in Australia.

Research Data Canada has established The Research Data Strategy Working Group – a collaborative effort by a multi-disciplinary group of universities, institutes, libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers to address the challenges and issues surrounding the access and preservation of data arising from Canadian research.

The group is currently working on a draft report “Stewardship of Research Data in Canada: Gap Analysis” which provides a statement of the ideal state of research data stewardship in Canada and a description of the current state, as determined by examining a number of indicators. The purpose is to provide evidence of gaps between current and ideal state in order to begin filling in the gaps. The indicators of the state of the stewardship of research data in Canada are as follows: policies; funding; roles and responsibilities; [trusted digital] data repositories; standards; skills and training; reward and recognition systems; research and development; accessibility; and preservation. The final version will be available in September.

Information on the working group and other Research Data Canada activities is available from its website.

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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.

Seamus Ross, professor of humanities informatics and digital curation at the University of Glasgow, has been appointed the new dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at Toronto University for a seven-year term effective 1st January 2009. There is further information on the appointment in the June issue of the University of Toronto Bulletin.

I am pleased to announce that the JISC-funded report A Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions has just been published and is now available to download as a pdf from the JISC Collections website. It has been a great pleasure to work with Julia Chruszcz, Maggie Jones and Terry Morrow on this study over the last few months.

The report is the result of a call by the JISC, issued in January 2008, for a Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions. The Invitation to Tender asked for a report that ‘will be published for wide use by institutions to inform policies and investment in e-journal archiving solutions.’ The ITT also stated that the report should ‘also inform negotiations undertaken by JISC Collections and NESLi2 when seeking publishers compliance to deposit content with at least one e-journal archiving solution.’

The report contains chapters covering: Approaches to e-journal preservation, Publisher licensing and legal deposit, Comparisons of Six Current e-Journal Archiving Programmes (LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, the KB e-depot, OCLC’s Electronic Collections Online, and the British Library’s e-journal Digital Archive), Practical experience of e-journal archiving solutions, Evaluation of four common scenarios/trigger events, and Criteria for judging relevance and value of new archiving initiatives. There are two appendices on Publisher Participation in different programmes.

The report has the following recommendations:

1. When negotiating NESLi2 agreements, JISCs negotiators should take the initiative by specifying archiving requirements, including a short-list of approved archiving solutions.
2. To help quantify the insurance risk and the necessary appropriate investment, bodies representing publishers and other trade organisations should gather and share statistical information on the likelihood of the trigger events outlined in this report.
3. Post cancellation access conditions should be defined in the licensing agreement between libraries and publishers. Publishers should be strongly encouraged to cooperate with one or more external e-journal archiving solutions as well as provide their own post-cancellation service (at minimal cost).
4. The publisher (or subscription agent) should state their policy on perpetual access under the four scenarios described in section 9.
5. When titles are sold on to other publishers, the Transfer Code of Practice (see section 9.3.) should be followed.
6. Archiving service providers and publishers should work together to develop standard cross-industry definitions of trigger events and protocols on the conditions for release of archived content. Project Transfer is a potential exemplar. The ground rules for any post-trigger event negotiation should be clear and transparent and established in advance.
7. Archive service providers must provide greater clarity on coverage details, including not only publishers and titles, but also the years and issues included in the archive.
8. Using the scenarios outlined in this report, libraries should carry out a risk assessment on the impact of loss of access to e-journals by their institution, and a cost/benefit analysis, in order to judge the value and relevance of the archiving solutions on offer.
9. Relevant UK bodies and institutions should use whatever influence they can bring to bear to ensure that archiving solutions cover publishers and titles of particular value to UK libraries.
10. The findings of this study should be reviewed and updated at regular intervals to reflect continuing developments in the field of e-journal archiving and preservation.

Its publication comes hot on the heels of two related studies the Portico/Ithaka e-journal archiving survey of US Library Directors and the JISC-funded UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme Evaluation Report. A further blog entry will follow!

I have posted two previous entries to the blog in March and January detailing progress with the JISC-funded research data preservation costs study. I am pleased to report that the online executive summary and full report (pdf file) titled “Keeping Research Data Safe: a cost model and guidance for UK Universities” is now published and can be downloaded from the JISC website.

It has been an very intensive piece of work over four months and I am extremely grateful to the many colleagues who contributed and made this possible. We have uncovered a lot of valuable data and approaches and hope this can be built on by future studies and implementation and testing. We have attempted to “show our workings” as far as possible to facilitate this so the text of the report is accompanied by extensive appendices.

We have made 10 recommendations on future work and implementation. For further information see the Executive Summary online.

The report iteself has chapters covering the Introduction, Methodology, Benefits of Research Data Preservation, Describing the Cost Framework and its Use, Key Cost Variables and Units,the Activity Model and Resources Template, Overviews of the Case Studies, Issues Universities Need to Consider, Different Service Models and Structures, Conclusions and Recommendations. There are also four detailed case studies covering the Universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Southampton, and the Archaeology Data Service (University of York).

Although focused on the UK and UK universities in particular, it should be of interest to anyone involved with research data or interested generally in the costs of digital preservation.

Comments and Feedback welcome!