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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’ve just looked at our webstats  and the Keeping Research Data Safe Factsheet has  had over 2,000 downloads in its first week of publication. A lot of work went into its development so it is great to see that level of interest.

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.

Jeremy Hunt UK Minister of Culture has announced today plans to abolish a number of UK bodies and advisory panels funded by his department.

These include abolition of the UK Museums, Libraries and Archives Council by 2012 and the winding up of the UK legal deposit advisory panel.

Other changes under consideration include reviewing the role and remit of English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) have released the report Survey of Digital Preservation Practices in Canada, which presents the result of a survey the LAC commissioned in 2008 and completed in 2009.

The survey received 61 full responses from a variety of types of organisations: libraries, archives government departments/agencies, museums, research institutes, across a number of sectors: academic, governments and not-for profit. Although invitations were sent to several organizations in private industry, no responses were received from this sector.

The survey found that 72% of respondents are involved in some aspects related to digital preservation. Offsite storage was the most commonly cited practice in use, followed by activities that address the decay or obsolescence of storage media, including refreshing, bitstream copying and replication.

Digital preservation practices that address the understandability of the digital object (format/software obsolescence), such as migration or emulation are less widespread, even amongst those repositories that have a formal mandate to preserve. As well, only a few repositories are employing the types of  extensive metadata schemas needed for long-term preservation, such as PREMIS.

The majority of repositories in the survey are applying some basic integrity measurements (virus check, format verification, checksum verification, format validation) but other methods for establishing authenticity and trust in digital repositories, such as through the use of persistent identifiers and audit trails for digital objects are not well established.

There are also numerous other challenges for repositories beyond the most obvious technical ones, in particular around funding/staffing and expertise.

The report concludes digital preservation presents significant challenges; and given the growing volume and complexity of digital information it will continue to do so in the future. It suggests one way to assist Canadian organisations with these challenges would be to establish a central entity in Canada that can provide leadership in this area.

The US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has recently awarded 38 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants totalling $22,623,984.

Amongst the awards list I was struck by the following:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Champaign, IL : Project Title: “Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC)”

Award Amount: $988,543; Matching: $179,822

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have partnered to establish Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC). DCERC will develop a model, including a field experience in a data intensive scientific environment, for educating LIS master’s and doctoral students in data curation. It will implement a graduate research and education program to address the need for professionals with scientific expertise who can manage and curate large digital data collections. Six doctoral students will benefit from this project.

Purdue University – West Lafayette, IN: Project Title: “Understanding Curation through the use of Data Curation Profiles”

Award Amount: $187,242; Matching: $104,868

Purdue University will create a series of workshops to expand the expertise of academic librarians about data curation issues. The needs of researchers and data producers are changing radically because of the disruptive effects of technology on research and its dissemination. This continuing education program will teach an estimated 370 librarians to be more effective data curators.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – Chapel Hill, NC: Project Title: “Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 3 (WILIS 3): Sustaining the Career Tracking Model through Data sharing”

Award Amount: $298,385; Matching: $85,637

The School of Information and Library Science, the Institute on Aging, and the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will collaborate to document the process of data archiving and sharing. The major aims of the WILIS 3 project are to create publicly accessible de-identified datasets; to develop an interactive program-specific data system to enable library and information science programs to explore their own data and benchmark with other programs; and to produce a data archiving toolkit for use by other researchers.

And in UK/European Library and Information schools we have…….???

The European Archive are organising a Web Archiving Training Session on 14th and 15th of October 2010 in Paris.

The training will cover all aspects of Web Archiving for librarians, archivists as well as technicians in charge of web archiving. Special attention will be given to providing the necessary background on Internet technologies in general and Web publishing in particular to understand the media and requirements for its preservation.

Registration fees for the 2 days (including lunches and coffee breaks)are 750€ standard rate or 580€ for non-profit and governmental organisations.

The new UK coalition government has been making some interesting policy decisions around government data extending some of the work already underway under the previous Labour administration. For example see the prime minister’s Letter to Government departments on opening up data issued on Monday 31 May 2010.

The conservative party (majority partner in the coalition) technology manifesto is well worth looking over for anyone interested in data and IT policy in the UK and an indicator of what might still be coming out of the new government.

In addition, to plans to open up government data and spending information it refers to research by Rufus Pollock et al at Cambridge University on the economic value of open data, which estimated it will create an estimated £6 billion in additional value for the UK. This boost to British jobs will come from the synergies and positive spillover benefits that result from businesses and social entrepreneurs building new applications and services using previously locked-up government data.

It is fascinating to see how big an effect on UK government policy advocacy by the likes of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Free Our Data campaign has had. Of course it helps if similar initiatives are underway in the USA – see the Wired interview with the US government’s first-ever chief information officer, Vivek Kundra.

The New Zealand Government has announced the merger of Archives New Zealand, the National Library and the Department of Internal Affairs and new funding of £5.9 million pounds (NZ$12.6 million) to create a digital archive for New Zealand.

Announcing the new funding and the merger, the Minister responsible for all three agencies, Guy Hands believes they share natural synergies, a common focus on using digital technology, and making public information widely accessible to citizens through the internet. This move will allow expertise and resources to be pooled, while at the same time sharing back office costs. All savings generated by this project will be redirected into better frontline services for the public.

The New Zealand Government is also allocating £5.9 million pounds (NZ$12.6 million) of new money to Archives New Zealand and the National Library over the next four years to develop and implement a full-scale industrial-strength digital archive. The new archive will utilise Archive’s New Zealand’s existing infrastructure and build on functions developed for the National Library’s National Digital Heritage Archive.

A public announcement about the Government Digital Archive and was made at the Government Recordkeeping Forum held in Wellington on Tuesday 1 June.