Beagrie.com

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!

Articles on Personal Archiving seem to be like the old-fashioned view of buses- nothing for a while then a whole lot in a row. Last month had a bumper crop. First of all two articles by Cathy Marshall in the latest issue (March/April 2008 vol 14 No 3/4)of D-Lib: “Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 1” and “Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving, Part 2“.

Hot on their heels in the April 2008 Issue of Ariadne comes “Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections” by Pete Williams et al on the Digital Lives project.

All three articles are highly recommended to those interested in this field.

At the same time Ian Rowlands at UCL is soliciting further input into digital lives – if you can help please complete the online questionnaire -further details as follows:

Digital Lives: Helping People to Capture and Secure their Individual Memories, their Personal Creativity, their Shared Historic Moments

Increasingly, our family memories, our personal achievements, our experiences of historical events, are being facilitated and recorded digitally.

Digital Lives is a pathfinding research project that is setting out to understand how individuals retain and manage their personal collections of computerised information – everything from digital photographs and videos to favourite podcasts and sentimental email messages – and how these digital collections can best be captured in the first place and preserved in the long term, perhaps for family history, biographical or other purposes.

The project is led by Dr Jeremy Leighton John and colleagues at the British Library who, together with experts from UCL and Bristol University, are researching the challenges that lie ahead as more and more of our memories and documentary witnesses exist in electronic form.

We would like to invite you to take part in our research by completing an online survey. This should take no more than ten minutes of your time and it will provide us with crucial information that will benefit the work of the British Library and other archives enormously as we plan for what is fast becoming a largely digital world.

If you would like to take part in the survey, please click here: <http://tinyurl.com/5wtwgm>.
If you would like to enter our Prize Draw and stand a chance of winning £200 in British Library gift vouchers (drawn at random and with no further obligation) you can register your interest at the end of the survey. Please note that all responses are strictly confidential. No individuals will be named when we report our findings, and the information collected will only be presented in an aggregated form. You will not be contacted again as a result of completing this survey.

If you have any questions, or are concerned about the bona fides of this survey, please email me at University College London by clicking here: <mailto:i.rowlands@ucl.ac.uk>.
Dr Ian Rowlands (UCL School of Library, Archive & Information Studies)
(Digital Lives is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council: Grant number BLRC 8669).

Research in the Cloud: Providing Cutting Edge Computational Resources to Scientists is an interesting recent post to the Google Research Blog. It provides Googles take on its participation in the National Science Foundation/Google/IBM collaboration within The Cluster Exploratory Program (CluE).

The NSF solicitation for proposals was released last week. To quote from the call:
‘In addition to the widespread societal impact of data-intensive computing, this computational paradigm also promises significant opportunities to stimulate advances in science and engineering research, where large digital data collections are increasingly prevalent. Well-known examples include the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Visible Human, the IRIS Seismology Data Base, the Protein Data Bank and the Linguistic Data Consortium, however other valuable data collections or federations of data collections are being assembled on an ongoing basis. In many fields, it is now possible to pose hypotheses and test them by looking in databases of already collected information. Further, the possibility of significant discovery by interconnecting different data sources is extraordinarily appealing. In data-intensive computing, the sheer volume of data is the dominant performance parameter. Storage and computation are co-located, enabling large-scale parallelism over terabytes of data. This scale of computing supports applications specified in high-level programming primitives, where the run-time system manages parallelism and data access. Supporting architectures must be extremely fault-tolerant and exhibit high degrees of reliability and availability.
The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) program has been designed to provide academic researchers with access to massively-scaled, highly-distributed computing resources supported by Google and IBM. While the main focus of the program is the stimulation of research advances in computing, the potential to stimulate simultaneous advances in other fields of science and engineering is also recognized and encouraged.’

It should be interesting to see how this collaboration evolves and the datasets it includes. For more information see the The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) program call text.

The Open Repositories conference (OR2008) repository is available at http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ as a permanent record of the conference activities.

The repository contains papers, presentations and poster artwork for 144 different conference contributions from the main conference sessions (Interoperability, Legal, Models, Architectures & Frameworks, National Perspectives, Scientific Repositories, Social Networking, Sustainability, Usage, Web 2.0), the Poster session, User Group sessions (DSpace, EPrints, Fedora), Birds of a Feather sessions, the Repository Managers session and the ORE Information day.

My powerpoint presentation from the Plenary keynote for the Fedora International Users’ Meeting is also available there. Titled “Keeping alert: issues to know today for long-term digital preservation with repositories” it focussed on research data and sustainability. It drew heavily from the forthcoming JISC Research Data Preservation Costs study and the draft final report titled ‘Keeping Research Data Safe: A Cost Model and Guidance for UK Universities’. It concludes by outlining tentative findings and implications for repositories from that report.

There is an excellent supplement on academic libraries today in the Guardian produced jointly with JISC. I would highly recommend it to international and UK colleagues who want a quick overview of latest developments in UK academic libraries.

You can also read the supplement online.

The supplement includes articles and overviews under the headings:

• Colleges, universities and the digital challenge
• Learning spaces
• Library 2.0
• New business models
• Digitisation
• The New User
• and last but by no means least [new] Librarians.

On Friday 18th April the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) celebrated its 25th anniversary and launched it new organisational title: Research Libraries UK (RLUK). A warm welcome to RLUK and best wishes for the next 25 years!

Further information and a press release is available on the RLUK website.

Now in its fourth year, the annual C21st Curation lecture series is held at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) in University College London.

The 2008 C21st Curation public evening lectures will be on 30 April 2008. Come hear two speakers, Roy Clare (Chief Executive, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) and Carole Souter (Chief Executive, Heritage Lottery Fund) talk about the impact of the recent Government Comprehensive Spending Review on their respective organisations. This seminar is open to students, professionals and the general public in the JZ Young lecture theatre at UCL from 6.00 -7.15pm, followed by a reception to which the speakers and the audience are invited. Attendance is free, but please email slais-admin@ucl.ac.uk to reserve a place.

I will be chairing the session and look forward to the lectures and seeing colleagues at the reception afterwards.

For further information and directions see the SLAIS C21st Curation lectures webpage .

I’m pleased to announce on the blog that Charles Beagrie successfully tendered to complete a study on institutional digital preservation policies for JISC. Our consultancy team for the project will be Neil Beagrie (project lead), Najla Rettberg (nee Semple), and Richard Wright. We will start work this month and submit in September.

As many of you will know, the JISC has supported UK Further Education and Higher Education institutions in addressing the challenges of long-term management and preservation of their digital assets through funding of a range of research and development programmes and advisory services. A recent synthesis of its digital preservation and records management programme noted that the costs and benefits of developing a coherent, managed and sustainable approach to institutional preservation of digital assets remain unexplored. Across the sector the development of institutional preservation policies is currently sporadic and digital preservation issues are rarely considered in key strategic plans. The lack of preservation policies and as a result the lack of consideration of digital preservation issues in other institutional strategies is seen as a major stumbling block by the community.

We look forward to helping institutions address this challenge and hope our forthcoming work will be of value to a wide range of different organisations.

We have just added a Google Maps “mash-up” to the Charles Beagrie website.

The Google Maps API has been used to give a world map display of our current and past clients and business partners and associates from lists in the site’s content management system. You can zoom in to parts of the map to see more congested zones such as the UK where not all map points will be visible on the world display.

There is a larger-scale version of the map display on the consultancy pages at www.beagrie.com/consultancy.php and a small-scale version on the home page.

The aim is to give an effective visual summary of the geographical spread of our work and our business associates and partners. We hope you feel it is a useful addition to the site.

Please take a look and give us your feedback.

I blogged back in January on the JISC Research Data Preservation Costs study and promised an update at the end of March. Well the draft final report titled ‘Keeping Research Data Safe: A Cost Model and Guidance for UK Universities’ is now with JISC and being peer-reviewed.

Its been a significant effort and I think it should be a major contribution to thinking on digital preservation cost models and costs in general: hopefully the final report will be out later this Spring. In short we have produced:

’¢ A cost framework consisting of:

o A list of key cost variables divided into economic adjustments (inflation/deflation, depreciation, and costs of capital), and service adjustments (volume and number of deposits, user services, etc);

o An activity model divided into pre-archive, archive, and support services;

o A resources template including major cost categories in TRAC ( a methodology for Full Economic Costing used by UK universities); and divided into the major phases from our activity model and by duration of activity.

Typically the activity model will help identify resources required or expended, the economic adjustments help spread and maintain these over time, and the service adjustments help identify and adjust resources to specific requirements. The resources template provides a framework to draw these elements together so that they can be implemented in a TRAC-based cost model. Normally the cost model will implement these as a spreadsheet, populated with data and adjustments agreed by the institution.

The three parts of the cost framework can be used in this way to develop and apply local cost models. The exact application may depend on the purpose of the costing which might include: identifying current costs; identifying former or future costs; or comparing costs across different collections and institutions which have used different variables. These are progressively more difficult. The model may also be used to develop a charging policy or appropriate archiving costs to be charged to projects.

In addition to the cost framework there are:

’¢ A series of case studies from Cambridge University, Kings College London, Southampton University, and the Archaeology Data Service at York University, illustrating different aspects of costs for research data within HEIs;

’¢ A cost spreadsheet based on the study developed by the Centre for e-Research Kings College London for its own forward planning and provided as a confidential supplement to its case study in the report;

’¢ Recommendations for future work and use/adaptation of software costing tools to assist implementation.

Watch this space (well blog) for a future announcement of the final report and url for the download.