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The first issue of the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available.

In this issue you will find:
’¢ News about new digital preservation partnerships
’¢ Recent reports and presentations
’¢ Digital preservation tips for a general audience
’¢ An announcement about the new Director at the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

Check http://www.digitalpreservation.gov for weekly updates or sign up for the RSS feed at http://www.loc.gov/rss/ (be sure to select ‘Digital Preservation.’ ).

Buried deep in the small print of the UK Government budget statement today was the following interesting item:

“The Office of Fair Tradings (OFT) market study into the commercial use of public information highlighted important issues around access to public sector information for commercial or other re-use. The Government commissioned Cambridge University to analyse the pricing of this information. This analysis is published alongside Budget 2008. The Government will look closely at public sector information held by trading funds to distinguish more clearly what is required by Government for public tasks and ensure that this information next Spending Review the Government will ensure that information collected for public
purposes is priced so that the need for access is balanced with ensuring that customers pay a fair contribution to the cost of collecting this information in the long term. These issues will be considered in conjunction with the assessment of trading funds.”

This report with the rather catchy title “Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds” by Prof David Newbery, Prof Lionel Bently, and Rufus Pollock from Cambridge University was published today and can be downloaded at http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45136.pdf.

For those interested in the context there has been a long-running debate over pricing of data from some government agencies. The Guardian hosts a “Free Our Data” campaign blog which has a commentary on the Cambridge report and associated issues.

The ALA has published a recent issue in its Library Technology Reports: The Preservation of Digital Materials by Priscilla Caplan, Assistant Director for Digital Library Services at the Florida Center for Library Automation.

As the series name suggests the focus is primarily digital preservation in libraries but a section on special topics also gives very brief overviews of records and archives, web-harvesting, databases, new media art, and personal collections, which may also be of interest to other audiences.

It is a brief, well-written report covering over 33 pages What is Digital Preservation, Preservation Practices, Foundations and Standards, Support for Digital Formats, Preservation Programs and Initiatives, Repository Applications, and Special Topics. It ends with a comprehensive index.

Individual copies cost $42 or are included in annual subscriptions to Library Technology Reports. For further details see ALA Publications.

A recent announcement by Portico and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands (the KB), notes that they have reached an agreement for an off-line copy of the Portico e-journal archive, to be held for safekeeping by the KB.

Placing a Portico-owned copy of the archive, in a secure access- and climate-controlled facility operated by the KB is one component of the replication strategy Portico is implementing to ensure the safety and security of its e-journal archive.

The announcement is of interest on several levels. It demonstrates in a very practical way the commitment by Portico and the KB to the concept of a “Safe Places Network”; and also implementation by Portico of the concept of replication of core electronic materials for international scholarship needing to have an international element – something one can also see in the archiving policies of Elsevier and the Internet Archive.

Lorcan Demsey’s blog entry on the Afterlife of Media and the observation “Who would have imagined, for example, that the youth of today would strum, drum and hum along to Should I stay or should I go? by The Clash?” sparked another chain of thought as I read it.

Individuals often struggle to convey the impact of digital preservation to a wider audience. I’ve been struck by how the introduction of ipods and itunes (and their competitors) have changed my musical listening (and those of teenagers too). It has suddenly made older music more accessible.

In my case to paraphrase Lorcan “who would have thought a teenage ska-punk fan would have Louis Prima (Swing Jazz) on their ipod?” (and not just the Jungle Book tune either).

Perhaps anyone wanting to explain long-term benefits of digital preservation to the public could do worse than looking at the impact of digital conversion and ongoing digital preservation in making old music, film or books available online?

Assembling the evidence would probably show Long-tail effects within digital preservation are having a profound impact.

Im pleased to announce on the blog that Tee EM Consulting (Terry Morrow) and Charles Beagrie Limited successfully bid in February for the contract to complete a study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions. It will be great to work with Terry on this study. The consultants from Charles Beagrie Limited will be myself and Maggie Jones. I’ve worked a lot with Maggie in the past and am really looking forward to working with her again on this study and e-journal archiving issues.

The aims of the investigation into e-journal archiving solutions are:

a. To provide UK institutions with real-world scenarios that will enable them to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the various archiving solutions. Different archiving solutions may suit some types of content more than others and depending on their focus, suit some institutions more than others;
b. To build on existing literature in this field, both JISC funded reports and other relevant material;
c. To identify and explore the potential differences across academic disciplines in the use and eventual exploitation of archived e-journal material;
d. To identify and explore the future needs of those working in UK HE/FE institutions, including researchers, teachers, students and librarians, in relation to archived e-journal material;
e. To identify and explore the future needs of a range of different teaching and research-oriented organizations, in relation to archived e-journal material.

Most digital curation and preservation news seems to come from Europe and North America so it is interesting to see emerging interest in digital curation and digital preservation issues in the developing economies. With that in mind Im flagging up the first African Digital Curation Conference held in Pretoria on 12-13 February which concluded today. The conference was organised under the auspices of the South African Department of Science and Technology, three science councils (the CSIR, the Human Sciences Research Council and the National Research Foundation), the University of Pretoria and the Academy of Science of South Africa.

The conference programme looks interesting.

During the first day, international speakers shared perspectives mainly from the UK, the European Union and the USA, whilst also looking at new roles and opportunities. The South African Minister of Science and Technology, Mr Mosibudi Mangena, talked on the implications of the OECD declaration on Data Sharing for Publicly Funded Research Data for African and South African policy on research data and information management.

Curation of African digital content and practices in specific science domains was the focus of day two of the event. Proceedings concluded with discussion on a formalised network of African data and information curation centres.

I hope there will be conference proceedings or reports and perhaps some colleagues who attend will blog the event: if so I will add a future post to the blog.

Colleagues may have missed the announcement that The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will invest £8 million in plans to create the UKs National Nuclear Archive (NNA) in Caithness, Scotland. The money will be invested over three years and will help get the £20 million project off the ground.

For those interested in the digital preservation issues involved in the NNA, I would refer you to an informative presentation by Simon Tucker Information Manager at NDA. This was a presentation to the ‘Nuclear Information over the Millennia Workshop’ held in November 2006.

The NNA will potentially hold between 20 and 30 million digital, paper and photographic records primarily concerning the history, development and decommissioning of the UKs civil nuclear industry since the 1940s. Around 20 specialist jobs will be created by the project. The archive will take about four years to build and many more to establish as an exemplar in its field. Land near the airport, currently owned by the local authority, has been earmarked as a potential site.

The development will undoubtably be an important one and is a good reminder of the long-term value over centuries of some electronic records and digital preservation issues in key industries.

Its still quite rare to see research library webpages covering the issues of how to manage and curate contemporary special collections in digital formats so I would like to flag up two particularly good examples here.
The first is the The Wellcome Trust Library’s Digital Curation webpages I came across recently. It is an excellent ‘how to’ guide and sharing of practical experience in dealing with digital special collections built up over the last couple of years at Wellcome. It includes links to the Library Strategy, a ‘Digital Curation Toolbox’, and useful glossary and links.
The second is the Workbook on Digital Private Papers produced by the Paradigm project. The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (paradigm) project funded by JISC involved the research libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. The workbook captures the projects experience in accessioning and ingesting digital private papers into their digital repositories, and processing these in line with archival and digital preservation requirements.

Both are highly recommended.

I’m currently looking closely at various efforts by different organisations to capture and model digital preservation costs as part of our work for JISC on developing a preservation cost model for research data.

As part of desk research for that work I have re-visited the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) Charging Policy now in its 4th edition (November 2007). I remember its first edition 10 years ago and being invited to comment on it when I was at the Arts and Humanities Data Service. It has continued to develop over the last 10 years but lost none of its accessibility and (professional) interest.

In short, it is a very user friendly, concise and informative document aimed at its depositors in the archaeological data community but its treatment of digital preservation costs and the thorny issue of charging are likely to make it of much wider interest hence this blog entry!

Digital Preservation costs are categorised and briefly explained under four headings:

• management and administration
• Ingest
• Dissemination
• Storage and refreshment

The document identifies charges for standard deposits and levels of service and indicates potential variants and additional costs. There is an accompanying webpage on refreshment costs.

Its a fascinating (honest) and short read – highly recommended.

For those following the aftermath of the AHRC decision to stop funding the AHDS the following snippet from the charging policy may also be of interest:
“The ADS currently receives some core funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The AHRC have indicated that the ADS should investigate a move toward a responsive mode funding for archives created by AHRC funded projects in the long term. In the past the ADS has waived deposit charges for researchers based in UK Higher Education Institutions. Due to the change in our core funding arrangements, from 1st January 2008 ALL deposits, whether from projects created within or outwith UK Higher Education will be subject to some level of charge.”