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This information event may be of interest to readers of the blog:

Meeting programme

Tuesday 4th September 2012 14:00 – 17:00

Background: The Digital Economy RCUK Theme Introduction to the ITaaU Network ITaaU Events and Opportunities Design for Usable IT (USTWO). The ITaaU Network and EU FP7 and Beyond (Dr. Mike Surridge, IT Innovation) The ITaaU Network and Asia (Prof. Gerard Parr, University of Ulster) Cloud & Pervasive Computing (Rob Fraser, Microsoft UK) Summary of ITaaU events, opportunities and deadlines

More details will be published on the Network web site  shortly. There will be no registration formalities or charge for this meeting but please email info@itutility.ac.uk to let them know that if you are planning to come so they can ensure adequate refreshments. The event is being held at the Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London. Directions can be found online.

IT as a Utility (ITaaU) is one of the 4 sub-themes of the RCUK Digital Economy programme . The ITaaU Network purpose is to promote and enhance the community interested in this aspect of the DE programme and help co-ordinate activities in this area. IT as a Utility is about the provision of information and technology in a transparent and highly usable manner. It is closely related to Grid and Cloud Computing with its emphasis on making IT resources effortlessly and almost invisibly available the end user. Cloud paradigms for access to applications and infrastructure are now well established, and are changing the way users interact with applications, especially where the application is accessible from multiple devices and users.

For further information, see  the website (this is being updated and a new version will appear soon) and also the blog post.

We are pleased to announce that the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK has published the report of the Economic Impact Evaluation of the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) to coincide with the launch of the new UK Data Service that succeeds it.

The ESDS has its origins in the UK Data Archive established over 40 years ago and this one of the longest standing research data archives and proponents of digital preservation in the World. The impact evaluation therefore may be of interest to the digital preservation and data curation communities beyond the social sciences and economics, particularly as quantitative as well as qualitative evidence of impact in our fields is still relatively rare.

The Economic Impact Evaluation of the Economic and Social Data Service report (PDF file) was produced by Charles Beagrie Ltd and the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) Victoria University and was authored by Neil Beagrie, John Houghton, Anna Palaiologk and Peter Williams. It combines approaches for qualitative and quantitative assessment of impact drawing on methodologies from Keeping Research Data Safe and more generally from economics and the social sciences.

An extract from the ESRC/ESDS press release of 24 July announcing the UK Data Service is as follows:

Continuing access to the most valuable collection of social and economic data in the UK has been secured with a £17 million investment over five years for the UK Data Service. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the new service is structured to support researchers in academia, business, third sector and all levels of government.

The new service, starting on 1 October 2012, will integrate the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS), the Census Programme, the Secure Data Service and other elements of the data service infrastructure currently provided by the ESRC, including the UK Data Archive.

The integration follows an economic evaluation of ESDS, which reveals that for every pound currently invested in data and infrastructure, the service returns £5.40 in net economic value to users and other stakeholders.

The UK Data Service will provide a unified point of access to the extensive range of high quality economic and social data, including valuable census data. It is designed to provide seamless access and support to meet the current and future research demands of both academic and non-academic users, and to help them maximise the impact of their work.

“The UK Data Service represents a significant step forward in our strategy,” says ESRC’s Chief Executive, Professor Paul Boyle. “As data are the lifeblood of research, our aim is to consolidate resources in a way that expands both the reach and impact of these vital investments. It will become a cornerstone for UK research; the place to go for high quality data and support.”

“Between our services we have an impressive collection of rich research data,” says Dr Matthew Woollard, director of the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) and the UK Data Archive. “We are dedicated to the reuse, sharing and archiving of data because we know the effect it can have on the wider society. Together, we look forward to becoming the UK Data Service so we can continue to build on these excellent data and services to generate even more impact.”

The full press release can be accessed here.

We are very pleased to announce that we will be providing consultancy support for the second stage sustainability and take-up phase of the BRISSkit service (www.brisskit.le.ac.uk). It was a pleasure for us working with colleagues at the University of Leicester and the Biomedical Cardiovascular Research Unit (LCBRU) at the NHS University Hospitals Leicester Trust in the first phase of the project. Our focus was on community engagement and the return on investment case for funding.

Further funding from JISC for the next stage of sustainability and take-up will now allow the project to consolidate the work to date and extend to two additional Biomedical Research Units within University Hospitals Leicester Trust (including the Institute for Lung Health Respiratory BRU & Lifestyle BRU) and to test the service with two external partners (UCL Institute of Child Health; and University of Birmingham School of Cancer Studies).

The Biomedical Research Infrastructure Software Service (BRISSkit) is led by the University of Leicester and will provide a suite of open source biomedical research database applications as secure web services in a browser. BRISSkit components may be hosted standalone or as integrated, cloud hosted solutions for researchers and clinicians, accessible via the UK JANET academic or NHS accredited networks. It will facilitate cohort discovery; making it easier for researchers to manage the identification, selection, engagement and recruitment of suitable subjects for research. Using internationally recognised data standards researchers and clinicians may then combine, query, visualise and output datasets. Components include:

•             contact management and patient recruitment

•             electronic clinical data capture

•             tissue sample management

•       research data combination and querying

The project partners are currently piloting these services with groups across the University Hospitals Leicester Trust and nationally, working with a range of technical partners and key stakeholders including JISC, HEFCE, JANET and the NHS National Institute for Health Research. For further information see the BRISSkit community website.

Research Data Management is very much in the news today with a lead article  in the Times Higher Education Supplement Seize the Data devoted to the issue and the release of the Royal Society Report Science as an Open Enterprise.

I was particularly pleased to see citation of our JISC funded research reports on Keeping Research Data Safe (pages 66-7) and the references to other major projects and programmes with which we have been involved such as Dryad and its sustainability and business case or the JISC Research Data Management Programme  in the Royal Society report.

Finally as the THES lead article notes one analysis of UK data equity estimated it to be worth £25.1 billion to British business in 2011. This is predicted to increase to £216 billion or 2.3 per cent of cumulative gross domestic product between 2012 and 2017. Although most of this is forecast to come from greater business efficiency in data use, £24 billion will stem from an increase in commercial data-driven R&D. The economic context alone draws attention to the huge importance of the issue, and in normal times would justify serious further investment in the science base.

We are very pleased to announce a new study and collaboration between Charles Beagrie Ltd and the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies University of Victoria (Prof John Houghton) on the impact of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) based at the University of York in the UK.

For more than fifteen years the ADS has been working to serve its users, both by acting as a long-term repository for valuable archaeological data and by providing open and free access to this data for research purposes. Its users, both those who deposit data and those who access it, come from all possible sectors of the archaeology discipline.

ADS regularly deal with data and data requests from academic archaeologists, local and national government archaeologists, the commercial sector, the community archaeology sector and, being an open archive, the general public. The ADS’s significance in the archaeological landscape has grown considerably in the last decade or so and with the use of access statistics and user feedback it has generally been easy for the ADS to demonstrate that it offers a valuable service to its users. However, it is a much more challenging proposition to find ways of analysing ADS usage that make a clear statement about the very important issue of how much economic impact that the ADS has on the sector. The new ADS Impact Study funded by JISC is intending to investigate in detail exactly this question and to give a clear indication of what the value of having a free to use and open access resource like the ADS is to the whole archaeological sector.

Engaging the expertise of Neil Beagrie of Charles Beagrie Ltd. and Professor John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES) , the project will analyse and survey indicators and perceptions of the value of digital collections held by the ADS and how those indicators and perceptions of value can be measured. The CSES and Charles Beagrie Ltd have led the field in conducting value perception and economic impact surveys for digital repositories and they have recently completed a similar exercise with the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) in the UK.

A major element of the study will be two forms of stakeholder survey. The first phase will see a selection of users and depositors from all sectors be invited to participate in in-depth interviews, and secondly an online survey will be launched to gauge the levels of use, impacts, and perceptions of value amongst the broadest possible range of ADS users.

Our economic analysis aims to include a range of approaches, starting with the most immediate and direct measures of value that are likely to represent lower bound estimates of the value of ADS data and services and moving outwards to estimates of the wider economic benefits:

We hope this project will not only have immediate benefits for the ADS, its stakeholders and user communities, but will build on previous work to investigate methodologies and good practice in the area of valuation that will be directly applicable to other repositories, in different domains, allowing them to reap the benefits of this work as they seek to analyse their own economic impact. For further information on the ADS Impact study see the Project web site.

An interesting development presented at recent US meetings(Association of Research Libraries and Coalition for Networked Information) is the launch of a Digital Preservation Network (DPN) by over 50 major US universities.

It is a very new initiative and you can find current information on the DPN website and a bit more information at the DPN launch team page. The initiative is being catalysed and led by James Hilton Vice-President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia.

The DPN caught my eye for many reasons. One being that in November 2008 with support from JISC, I was part of a digital archiving study group with amongst others Don Walters (Mellon Foundation) and Sandy Payette (Fedora Commons) that presented and debated the subject of digital preservation with US university presidents and Vice-Chancellors from UK universities who were part of the Windsor Group. The meeting was hosted by the University of Virginia.

The meeting had an extremely influential group of attendees and provided sufficient time and the right environment for them to engage seriously with the topics presented. I was surprised by the real level of engagement and recognition of the problem of digital archiving and sense of mission and responsibility that universities should have coming from the University Presidents and V-Cs themselves. It resonated very strongly as an issue with the university leaders present – not an outcome I had necessarily expected.

Unfortunately the follow-up from that meeting was hit by the economic crisis which was a big disappointment given the progress made. However I sense that the development of DPN perhaps flows from that meeting and the work of colleagues on the digital archiving working group eventually may prove fruitful.

The Digital Preservation Coalition, Richard Wright and Charles Beagrie Ltd are delighted to announce the public release of the latest DPC Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound’, written by Richard Wright, formerly of the BBC.

‘Moving image and sound content is at great risk’, explained Richard Wright. ‘Surveys have shown that 74 per cent of professional collections are small: 5,000 hours or less. Such collections have a huge challenge if their holdings are to be preserved. About 85 per cent of sound and moving image content is still analogue, and in 2005 almost 100 per cent was still on shelves rather than being in files on mass storage. Surveys have also shown that in universities there is a major problem of material that is scattered, unidentified, undocumented and not under any form of preservation plan. These collection surveys are from Europe and North America because there is no survey of the situation in the UK, in itself a cause for concern.’

‘This report is for anyone with responsibility for collections of sound or moving image content and an interest in preservation of that content.’

‘New content is born digital, analogue audio and video need digitization to survive and film requires digitization for access. Consequently, digital preservation will be relevant over time to all these areas. The report concentrates on digitization, encoding, file formats and wrappers, use of compression, obsolescence and what to do about the particular digital preservation problems of sound and moving images.’

The report discusses issues of moving digital content from carriers (such as CD and DVD, digital videotape, DAT and minidisc) into files. This digital to digital ‘ripping’ of content is an area of digital preservation unique to the audio-visual world, and has unsolved problems of control of errors in the ripping and transfer process. It goes on to consider digital preservation of the content within the files that result from digitization or ripping, and the files that are born digital. While much of this preservation has problems and solutions in common with other content, there is a specific problem of preserving the quality of the digitized signal that is again unique to audio-visual content. Managing quality through cycles of ‘lossy’ encoding, decoding and reformatting is one major digital preservation challenge for audio-visual as are issues of managing embedded metadata.

DPC members have already had a preview. Pip Laurenson of Tate commented ‘This is a terrific report. Thank you so much for commissioning it – it is the best thing I have read on the subject.’

The report has also been subject to extensive review prior before publication. Oya Rieger and colleagues at Cornell University who reviewed the final draft welcomed the report: ‘It is a very thorough report. We realize that it was a challenging process to gather and organize all this information and present it in a succinct narrative. Another virtue of the report is that it incorporates both analog and digital media issues. The final section with conclusions and recommendation is very strong and provides an excellent summary.’

Another reviewer explained why the preview for DPC-members was so timely: ‘We are currently working on a grant proposal focusing on new media art and having access to the preserving moving pictures and sound report was very useful. The report provides a thorough characterization of the current practices, shortcomings, and challenges. Having access to the report has saved us from spending expensive time on conducting a literature review. ‘

DPC Technology Watch Reports identify, delineate, monitor and address topics that have major bearing on ensuring our collected digital memory will be available tomorrow. They provide an advanced introduction in order to support those charged with ensuring a robust digital memory and they are of general interest to a wide and international audience with interests in computing, information management, collections management and technology. The reports are commissioned after consultation with members; they are written by experts; and they are thoroughly scrutinised by peers before being released. The reports are informed, current, concise and balanced and they lower the barriers to participation in digital preservation. The reports are a distinctive and lasting contribution to the dissemination of good practice in digital preservation.

‘Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound’ is the second Technology Watch Report to be published by the DPC in association with Charles Beagrie Ltd. Neil Beagrie, Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd, was commissioned to act as principal investigator and managing editor of the series in 2011. The managing editor has been further supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who have commented on the text prior to release. The Editorial Board comprises William Kilbride (Chair), Neil Beagrie (Series Editor), Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth), Sarah Higgins (Archives and records Association), Tim Keefe (Trinity College Dublin), Andrew McHugh (University of Glasgow) and Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library).

The report is online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr12-01  (PDF 915KB)

Buried deep in the small print of today’s UK government budget were confirmation of a couple of important measures for universities and research centres developing shared infrastructure and services:

2.191 VAT: cost sharing – Following the announcement at Autumn Statement 2011 the
Government will introduce a VAT exemption for services shared between VAT exempt bodies
including charities and universities. (Finance Bill 2012) (h)

2.184 VAT: relief for European Research Infrastructure Consortia – As announced at
Budget 2011, the Government will introduce secondary legislation in autumn 2012 to provide
VAT relief to European Research Infrastructure Consortia.

UK VAT is levied at 20% so these exemptions and reliefs are potentially very important for those developing shared research infrastructure and services. Currently, initiatives seeking to leverage economies of scale between institutions can face a barrier of an additional  20% surcharge for VAT.

The Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher and Further Education Councils (JISC) has announced that it is to become a limited company on 1st August 2012. This is part of the implementation of the recommendations from the Wilson review of JISC. Currently the JISC is not a legal entity but still just a committee with all employment or other contracts arranged either through HEFCE or the universities of Bristol and KCL that host JISC offices. The operational difficulties of this arrangement had previously led to establishing limited companies for parts of JISC operations such as JISC Collections, so the change is a logical progression.

Probably the sector’s greatest interest in the implementation of the Wilson Review though will be the JISC budget going forward and its allocation across its future activities. JISC funds a wide-range of shared services and innovation projects across UK universities. News on this is still to emerge.

We are delighted to announce that the Preserving Email technology watch report has now been published by the DPC. It is published electronically as a PDF and is now free to download from the DPC website at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr11-01.  It was previously available as a preview to DPC members only from December 2011. Charles Beagrie are managing editors for the Technology Watch Series and have worked closely with the DPC in the production of this report. The full press release for the report is copied below and you are welcome to forward it to interested colleagues.

For immediate release

Email tomorrow … and next year … and forever

Preserving Email, a new report from the DPC gives practical advice on how to ensure email remains accessible

Email is a defining feature of our age and a critical element in all manner of transactions. Industry and commerce depend upon email; families and friendships are sustained by it; government and economies rely upon it; communities are created and strengthened by it.  Voluminous, pervasive and proliferating, email fills our days like no other technology.  Complex, intangible and essential, email manifests important personal and professional exchanges.  The jewels are sometimes hidden in massive volumes of ephemera, and even greater volumes of trash. But it is hard to remember how we functioned before the widespread adoption of email in public and private life.

Institutions, organizations and individuals have a considerable investment in – and legal requirements to safeguard – large collections of email.  IT managers and archivists have long recognised that email requires careful management if it is to be available in the long term but practical advice about how to do this is surprisingly sparse.  So a new ‘Technology Watch Report’ from the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) will be of wide interest.

‘The first email was probably sent by researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965’, explained Chris Prom of the University of Illinois, the report’s author. ‘It has long since gone missing, deemed too trivial to be worth preserving.’

‘Since then email has become a valuable documentary form because people typically use it to write things that were not intended for wide revelation at the time. So it can contain material which researchers – and high court judges – find incredibly useful.’

‘Users normally shoulder the ultimate responsibility for managing and preserving their own email.  This exposes important records to needless risks and is counterproductive in many cases. But it doesn’t have to be like this.  Individuals and organizations can lay the foundation for long term access so long as they understand the technical standards that underlie email systems. Based on this understanding, they can implement sensible preservation strategies.’

‘The Preserving Email report provides a comprehensive advanced introduction to the topic for anyone who has to manage a large email archive in the long term: and in the long term that will be most of us.’

Gareth Knight of King’s College London welcomed the report.  ‘Preserving Email provides an excellent overview of the topic, drawing together observations made in a number of research projects to provide a succinct overview of the legal, technical, and cultural issues that must be addressed to ensure that these digital assets can be curated and preserved in the long-term. Its conclusion, providing a set of pragmatic, easy-to-understand recommendations that individuals and institutions may apply to better manage their email archive, highlights the complexity of email preservation.  It also sends a clear message that it is something that everyone can perform.’

The British Library is among the agencies currently working on new strategies to preserve email.  Maureen Pennock of the British Library welcomed in particular the two short case studies which are included in the report. ‘The report includes case studies from the Bodleian Library and the Medical Research Council which are really useful in making sense of the practical problems which we face, and how to resolve them in practice not just theory.  They show what can be achieved  and underline just how useful the core email standards are.’

Neil Beagrie of Charles Beagrie Ltd, managing editor and principal investigator of the Technology Watch Series highlighted the plans for more reports in the series in the near future.  ‘Preserving Email is the first of five planned publications from leading experts in the new DPC Technology Watch Series.  The format of the new reports has had a major redesign, and ISSN and DOI identifiers have been added.  We hope these features will enhance the use, citation and impact of the reports. Further reports on Preservation of Moving Picture and Sound, Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Preservation, Digital Forensics and Preservation, and Preservation Trust and Continuing Access for e-Journals will be released later in 2012. The DPC and Charles Beagrie hope the new series will be a significant contribution to encouraging digital preservation and best practice worldwide.’

Richard Ovenden, Deputy Director of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University and Chair of the DPC welcomed the report.  ‘This is the tenth anniversary of the Coalition, which was launch in the House of Commons in February 2002.  One of the ways we are marking this year is by releasing a new set of reports to update and extend the advice we offer.  The Technology Watch Reports are a popular and lasting help to anyone interesting in ensuring that their digital memory available in the long term, and we work hard to ensure they are accessible as well as authoritative.  This new report of Preserving Email will be particularly relevant to a wide readership so it’s a great way to kick off our tenth anniversary year.’

The report is online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7207/twr11-01

Notes for editors

1.    Preserving Email (DPC Technology Watch Report 11-01, ISSN 2048-7916, Digital Preservation Coalition 2011) was written by Chris Prom of the University of Illinois.  It is published electronically as a PDF and is now free to download from the DPC website at: http://www.dpconline.org / … It was previously available as a preview to DPC members only from December 2011.
2.    Chris Prom is the Assistant University Archivist at the University of Illinois, Urbana USA.  During 2009–10, as part of his Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award, Prom directed a research project at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, Scotland, on ‘Practical Approaches to Identifying, Preserving, and Providing Access to Electronic Records’. This included a major focus on the preservation of email.
3.    The report is published by the DPC in association with Charles Beagrie Ltd. Neil Beagrie, Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd, was commissioned to act as principal investigator for and managing editor of this Series in 2011. He has been further supported by an Editorial Board drawn from DPC members and peer reviewers who comment on texts prior to release.
4.    The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is an advocate and catalyst for digital preservation, enabling our members to deliver resilient long-term access to content and services, and helping them derive enduring value from digital collections.  We raise awareness of the importance of the preservation of digital material and the attendant strategic, cultural and technological issues. We are a not-for-profit membership organisation and we support our members through knowledge exchange, capacity building, assurance, advocacy and partnership.  Our vision is to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow. For more information about the DPC see: http://www.dpconline.org/
5.    The 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 practice and they lower the barriers to participation in digital preservation. Each ‘Technology Watch Report’ analyses a particular topic pertinent to digital preservation and presents an evaluation of workable solutions, a review the potential of emerging solutions and posits solutions that might be appropriate for different contexts.  The reports are written by leaders-in-the-field and are peer-reviewed prior to publication.
6.    Future reports in the series include:
·    Preserving Moving Picture and Sound, Richard Wright (BBC Research and Development)
·    Digital Forensics for Preservation, Jeremy Leighton-John (British Library)
·    Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Preservation, Andrew Charlesworth (Bristol University)
·    Preservation, Trust and E-Journals, Neil Beagrie (Charles Beagrie Ltd)

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