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The following recent press announcement from the UK Ministry of Justice may be of interest to readers of the blog:

The government has today [16 July] set out plans to make sure that more public information is made available and is preserved for future generations.

Justice Minister, Michael Wills, has today announced the publication of a new Code of Practice on managing digital and other records, and the government’s plans to extend the Freedom of Information Act.

Freedom of Information depends on good record keeping and the preservation of information is important if we are to further increase transparency in public life. The updated Code of Practice is a significant step in ensuring that key records remain accessible to public bodies for day to day business and are preserved for future generations. The Code recommends public bodies across the country introduce a strategy for the preservation of digital records to ensure that they can continue to be accessed and used and are resilient to future changes in technology.

The government has also published its response to the consultation on extending the Freedom of Information Act. The government’s response reflects the considerable support for extending the Act. A further consultation will now be undertaken with those proposed for inclusion within the scope of the Act: Academies, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS).

This is an initial step and further consultations with Network Rail and utility companies will examine how the Freedom of Information Act could apply to other bodies.

These publications support the government’s plans to increase the accessibility of public information and promote the culture of openness and transparency in public life. On 10 June the Prime Minister committed to a reduction of the 30 year rule to 20 years in response to the 30 Year Rule Review. The government is considering carefully the practical details of implementing a new rule and aims to publish its full response in late summer.

Michael Wills, Justice Minister, said:

‘The introduction of the Freedom of Information Act has significantly increased transparency in public life and the right to access information has become a cornerstone of our democracy.

‘The steps we are taking today – to keep and preserve public information for the future and extend the Freedom of Information Act – are significant if we are to truly promote the culture of openness in public life.’

The Code is an updated 2009 version of the Lord Chancellor’s Code of Practice on the management of records issued under section 46 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The Alliance of German Science Organisations has established a priority initiative for digital information. The digital information initiative is focusing on six major areas: national licensing; open access; a national hosting strategy for electronic resources; primary research data; virtual research environments; and legal frameworks.

I am pleased to announce that Charles Beagrie Limited in association with Globale Informationstechnik GmbH have been awarded the consultancy on behalf of the Alliance for German Scientific Organisations to develop recommendations for a national hosting strategy for electronic resources in Germany.

Neil Beagrie will lead the consultancy with Prof Matthias Hemmje. Charles Beagrie Associates working on the project are Mary Auckland, Julia Chruszcz, Diana Leitch, Tery Morrow, and Najla Rettberg.

The project plan and project webpage for the JISC-funded Keeping Research Data Safe 2 project (KRDS2) are now available on the Charles Beagrie website. The webpage has been set-up to support dissemination of information on the project and provide the background to the work, details of the project partners, and the project plan.

The first Keeping Research Data Safe study funded by JISC made a major contribution to the study of preservation costs by developing a cost model and indentifying cost variables for preserving research data in UK universities.

KRDS2 aims to extend this previous work on digital preservation costs. It is identifying long-lived datasets for the purpose of cost analysis and building on the work of the first “Keeping Research Data Safe” study completed in 2008.

The KRDS2 project commenced on 31 March 2009 and will complete in December 2009. For further information see  the project plan.

A landmark development has been announced with the merger of DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons. Both are major players in digital preservation and open source content management systems particularly in the Higher Education sector. Both have been collaborating closely in recent years and the two organisations have now merged to form the new organisation DuraSpace.

DuraSpace will continue to support its existing software platforms, DSpace and Fedora but in addition is planning a number of new developments. The first new technology to emerge will be a Web-based service named “DuraCloud” – a hosted service that takes advantage of the cost efficiencies of cloud storage and cloud computing, while adding value to help ensure longevity and re-use of digital content. The DuraSpace organisation is developing partnerships with commercial cloud providers who offer both storage and computing capabilities to deliver this service.

I agree wholeheartedly with Cliff Lynch Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) who is quoted in the press release as follows:

“This is a great development. It will focus resources and talent in a way that should really accelerate progress in areas critical to the research, education, and cultural memory communities. The new emphasis on distributed reliable storage infrastructure services and their integration with repositories is particularly timely.”

For further information on DuraSpace see the new website and press release .

I am pleased to report that Charles Beagrie Ltd will be the lead contractor for Keeping Research Data Safe 2: a  new JISC-funded study of the identification of long-lived digital datasets for the purposes of cost analysis.

The study aims to build on the work from the original Keeping Research Data Safe consultancy and is being undertaken by a consortium consisting of 4 partners involved in the original  study (University of Cambridge, Charles Beagrie Ltd, OCLC, and University of Southampton) and 4 new partners (the Archaeology Data Service, University of Oxford, UK Data Archive, and University of London Computer Centre) with significant data collections and interests in preservation costs. All the partners bring considerable relevant expertise, knowledge and resources to the project.

The new study will identify and analyse sources of long-lived data and develop longitudinal data on associated preservation costs and benefits. We believe these outcomes will be critical to developing preservation costing tools and cost benefit analyses for justifying and sustaining major investments in repositories and data curation.

The project will utilise the Keeping Research Data Safe cost framework as a tool for organising and scoping its work. We will undertake a combination of desk research; a data survey; analytical work with national and disciplinary digital archives that have existing historic cost data for preservation of digital research data; and interaction with digital archives in research universities who have little or no historic cost data but a strong interest in this study and identifying criteria and metrics for capturing cost data going forward.

A project website will be available shortly and regular updates on the study will be posted to this blog.

An interesting emerging digital preservation development is the Unified Digital Formats Registry (UDFR) combining efforts from the UK National Archive’s PRONOM service and Harvard University’s Global Digital Formats Registry (GDFR).

THE GDFR website notes in April 2009 the GDFR initiative joined forces with the UK National Archives’ PRONOM registry initiative under a new name – the Unified Digital Formats Registry (UDFR). The UDFR will support the requirements and use cases compiled for GDFR and will be seeded with PRONOM’s software and formats database. A new website is being constructed for the UDFR and will be available at www.udfr.org.

To quote from the UDFR Proposal and Roadmap:

” There are two major efforts underway to create a format registry with complimentary strengths and weaknesses. PRONOM, created by The National Archives (TNA) in the UK, has a strong technological base, and has been building a database of original information about various digital formats. PRONOM at this point however is owned and maintained by a single organization, making it vulnerable to changes in that institution. The Global Digital Formats Registry (GDFR) effort, hosted by Harvard University, has developed a model for a registry based on shared governance, cooperative data contribution, and distributed data hosting. However, GDFR is technically less far along in development, and has not yet begun database building.

Given the paucity of resources in the digital preservation community it would be highly unfortunate if these efforts were to compete for resources. Therefore a group of involved and interested institutions have agreed to join together to create a single shared formats registry drawing on the individual strengths of the two existing efforts. The initiative would:

• be technically based on the existing PRONOM system and database;

• create a community governance model for the registry involving all institutions willing to contribute to its development;

• develop a mechanism for the distribution of the registry data in such a way as to support local extensions and additions to the database;

• develop both technical and organizational support for distributed input to the registry, including some form of quality vetting of contributed data.”

Further details of the proposal are available from the GDFR website.

160 people gathered today at the Royal Society at the one day international conference on the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility Study.

The eight page management summary from the final report has been made available on the UKRDS website to co-incide with the conference. This recommends to HEFCE that the UKRDS is feasible and should be funded over a period of at least 5 years. In the first instance it recommends a 2-year Pathfinder phase should be funded at a cost of £5.31m.  It estimates overall savings delivered by a scaled-up UKRDS service to be the financial equivalent of 63.5 FTEs over a period of five years.
You can also find the presentations from the day available online.

HEFCE is still considering the report but it said to regard it favourably. A final decision is awaited.

A potentially important development in digital curation is the creation of a new International Society for Biocuration.

The mission of the Society will be to:

1. Define the work of biocurators for the scientific community and the public funding agencies;
2. Propose a discussion forum for interested biocurators, developers, scientists and students.
3. Organize a regular meeting where biocurators will be able to present their work and discuss their projects.
4. Lobby to obtain increased and stable funding for biocuration resources that are essential to research;
5. Build a relationship with publishers and establish a link between researchers and databases through journal publishers
6. Organize a regular workshop where new biocurators, or interested students can be trained in the use of the common tools needed for their work.
7. Provide documentation on the use of common database and bioinformatics tools.
8. Provide ‘Gold Standards’ for databases, such as the use of unique, traceable identifiers, use of shared tools, etc.;
9. Share documentation on standards and annotation procedures with the aim of developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
10. Foster connections with user communities to ensure that databases and accompanying tools meet specific user needs;
11. Maintain a biocurator job market forum.

The new Society will have its official launch at the 3rd International Biocuration Conference 16-19 April 2009 in Berlin.

Some years ago (February 2006) Chris Rusbridge, director of the DCC,wrote a great article in Ariadne entitled “Excuse Me… Some Digital Preservation Fallacies?” . The aim of the article was to challenge some potential “digital preservation urban myths” , a number of common assertions about digital preservation that had begun to worry him.

One of the assumptions Chris challenged was that a large number of commercially-orientated file formats become rapidly obsolete and inaccessible. He had been unable to find any good examples where a large amount of content is completely inaccessible today.

Memories of Chris’s article came back to me when  reading some recent press reports in the BBC and national newspapers mentioning that:

“Britain’s National Archive estimates that it holds enough information to fill about 580,000 encyclopaedias in formats that are no longer widely available.”

So should I start emailing Chris now? I’m afraid not. I remember that 580,000 figure from an a 2007 TNA press release. Going back to it, you can see that this figure of 580,000 encyclopaedias was intended as an approximation for the TNA’s combined paper and digital records. A growing proportion of this is digital and to quote the press release ” in some instances, applications that support older file formats are no longer commercially available”.

Sorry Chris no email yet 🙂

The Dutch National Library (the KB), The Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (Association of European Research Libraries – LIBER), and the Dutch Digital Preservation Coalition (NCDD) are holding a digital preservation workshop titled e-Merging New Roles and Responsibilities in the European Landscape on 17 April at the KB, The Hague, Netherlands.

The workshop aims to develop a basic understanding of the issues presented by long-term digital curation and preservation of resources which are (to be) deposited in institutional and subject-based repositories – both within research institutions and research communities. It will highlight the state of the art in digital curation and will cover best practices, including possibilities for outsourcing.

I will be chairing the afternoon session on “Policy, preconditions and costs: opportunities and pitfalls in long-term digital preservation”  with Marcel Ras, Head of the e-Depot at the KB. Attendees registering for the workshop have the opportunity to  list a specific question or problem they would like to see covered, so the session content will be tailored to your suggestions! For further information see the workshop webpages linked above.