What's New - Issue 27, July 2010

New RIN Guide - Government and research policy in the UK: an introduction
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.rin.ac.uk/node/619
The Research Information Network have published a new guide which describes the nature, roles and responsibilities of the different Government bodies involved in research policy and funding, and the relationships between them.

New Web Archiving Tools Launched
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://code.google.com/p/liwa-technologies/
New Web Archiving technology for dealing with streaming video has been developed by LiWA, a European project led by the University of Hannover.

New Repositories Support Project Blog
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://rspproject.wordpress.com/
The blog features updates on the RSP team activities, overviews of events that the team have participated in and covers issues of importance to repository managers.

NISO Publishes Special Digital Preservation Issue of Information Standards Quarterly - Selected articles now available for free download
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://ww.niso.org/publications/isq/2010/v22no2/
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of the Spring 2010 issue of the Information Standards Quarterly(ISQ) magazine with a special issue theme of Digital Preservation. ISQ Guest Content Editor, Priscilla Caplan, Assistant Director for Digital Library Services, Florida Center for Library Automation, has compiled a stellar set of articles on the topic-authored by experts in the field from the U.S., U.K, Canada, and New Zealand.

Visualization of the Metadata Universe
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap
The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. A new resource, Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe is intended to assist planners with the selection and implementation of metadata standards.

Portico Archive Reaches Milestone in Digital Preservation
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/
Portico is pleased to announce that 110 publishers, representing more than 2,000 professional and scholarly societies, are now participating in the Portico archive. Furthermore, nearly 15 million articles are now safely preserved in the Portico archive.

JISC MRD Workshop slides now available
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd/rdmevents/programmemeetingmay.aspxbr />The slides from presentations at the JISC Managing Research Data Programme Workshop, held in Manchester on 17-18 May 2010 are now available. The purpose of the workshop was to consider how best to meet the challenge of managing research data in UK Universities. Participants were informed of progress made under the JISCMRD Programme to examine researchers’ data management requirements and improve planning in a number of academic and institutional contexts.

Austrian National Library and Google cooperate in digitisation
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.onb.ac.at/ev/austrianbooksonline/
As one of the first national libraries worldwide the Austrian National Library will digitise its complete holdings of public domain books from the 16th to the 19th century. This project will make one of the five internationally most important historical book collections available online.

LoC Digital Preservation Newsletter
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/newsletter/201006.pdf
The June 2010 issue of the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available.

Ireland's National Portal for Open Access to Research Goes Live
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.rian.ie
Ireland’s national portal for Open Access to Irish published research (RIAN) will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

New report from The National Archives on digital continuity risk in large local authorities in England
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/recordsmanagement/publications.htm
Digital Continuity requires strategic alignment, senior understanding and commitment and effective working relationships between Senior Information Risk Owners, ICT Managers, information assurance and governance officers and those responsible for business processes as well as records and information management. This report is not part of the central government-funded Digital Continuity project but was commissioned to provide an evidential basis for future dissemination of that project’s findings to the wider public sector.

Digital Preservation Award 2010: open for nominations and judges announced
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.dpconline.org/events/digital-preservation-awards/digital-preservation-award-2010
The Digital Preservation Award is awarded to the nominee who, in the eyes of the judges, best demonstrates excellence and innovation that will help to ensure our digital memory is available tomorrow. The judging panel for the 2010 awards include Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh; Adrian Brown, Assistant Clerk of the Record, Parliamentary Archives; William Kilbride, Executive Director, Digital Preservation Coalition; Pip Laurenson, Head of Time-based Media Conservation, Tate; Zoe Lock, Lead Technologist for ICT, The Technology Strategy Board; Eefke Smit, Director for Standards and Technology, Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers' Association; Dave Thompson, Digital Curator, The Wellcome Library; Matthew Woolard, Director Designate, the UK Data Archive; and Richard Wright, Senior Research Engineer, BBC.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-10.htm
This June 2010 issue takes a close look at the unanimous faculty votes for institutional OA policies.

Europeana Publishes First White Paper: Knowledge = Information In Context
Retrieved 30 June 2010 from: http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/whitepapers
Europeana's first White Paper looks at the key role linked data will play in Europeana's development and in helping Europe's citizens make connections between existing knowledge to achieve new cultural and scientific developments. Without linked data, Europeana could be seen as a simple collection of digital objects. With linked data, the potential is far greater, as the author of the white paper, Prof. Stefan Gradmann, explains.

One of the reasons for producing the monthly “What's New” is that it can be challenging keeping up with developments in a field that continues to spread its boundaries. An increasing range of new entrants to the field bring new insights and perspectives, but also sadly sometimes repeat the work that has already been done by others. Different professional groups have come to an awareness of the need to think about digital preservation at different times, and have taken differing amounts of time to turn concern into action. In some cases the action preceded considered thought. For instance, part of my first job working for the medical research council included the rescue of old digital research data. I learnt a great deal from older colleagues who had need to do this many times before, but none of us used phrases like 'digital preservation' to talk about what we did. When I first began to consciously use the term in the mid-1990s, there were few professional events one could attend to discuss such matters. The few that existed, such as the DLM-Forum which first met in 1996, gave one the feeling that the world's entire expertise was contained in the one room; and that probably wasn't too far from the truth. It would be impossible to do that today, and increasing specialisation probably means that many of those involved would not recognise others as engaged in the same field.

One of the resources that I found invaluable in those (for me) early days was Michael Day's bibliography on the preservation of electronic information, something which Michael stopped updating about 10 years ago because the proliferation of publications now meant it was impossible to keep up to date. The bibliography (and many of the works it identifies) still makes useful and interesting reading. The early work of those such as Bell, Dollar and Fishbein show that the problems that machine-readable information might present were apparent to some in the 1970s. But for almost three decades thereafter, it was feasible for one person to have read and digested all of the literature that had been published in the field, whether it emerged from the world of libraries, archives, computer science or industry (to name just a few sources.) By the end of the century that was becoming an impossible task; the fragmentation we now see between electronic records management, digital libraries, research data curation and the preservation of computer games (again, to give just a few examples) was already under way.

The fragmentation brings risks with it, but it is also necessary to some extent. We have moved from a time when most discussion was simply about acknowledging that there was a problem and attempting to describe it, to one where a great deal of real activity is taking place on a large and small scale, in many different types of organisations. We need larger numbers of people who are trained to do specific jobs and do them well, rather than theorising about what those jobs might be. In such an environment, it's important that (say) virtual world preservers can talk to other virtual world preservers about the issues that arise in their day-to-day tasks and about how to tackle them, without worrying about whether this does or does not have any bearing on the preservation and curation of meteorological satellite data. But it's also important that we have some people who are taking a broader view and ensuring that work is not replicated between domains and that information is effectively shared.

“What's New” is one tool to help deal with this task of information exchange. As time goes by, I find it more and more valuable. But the Digital Preservation Coalition itself is another key factor in preventing the fragmentation of knowledge. Many of its member organisations have knowledge dissemination and exchange as part of their remit. At the DCC, for instance, we try to ensure that those active in research data management are kept aware of each other's activities and also of developments elsewhere that may be relevant to them. We can also bring lessons learnt in that field to a wider audience, whether it be in local or national government, national libraries, information science or industry, where the lessons are meaningful outside that particular field. The DPC has a key role to play in helping each of its partners maintain that exchange of knowledge and practical advice. It's why we all continue with our membership. As we enter difficult times, when conference attendance or journal subscriptions may be even harder to maintain, the DPC's role is even more important to us.

Bjarne Andersen, Head of Digital Resources, State and University Library, Denmark

This report gives a brief overview of digital preservation activities in Denmark at a national level and primarily within cultural heritage institutions. The core set of institutions working together on many aspects of digital preservation includes the Royal Library, the State Archives, the Danish Film Institute and the State and University Library which I represent.

Before jumping into an overview of the current activities I would like to briefly introduce the main parts of the digital cultural heritage collections in Denmark. In 1998 the Legal Deposit Law underwent a revision and from then on static web material had to be saved for the future. This was in practice the first legal deposit of digital material. The two libraries with national obligations had both made pilot digitization projects already but only on a smaller scale. The first legal deposit of web material was collected upon request from publishers who had to register their publications for deposit. Compared to modern day web this meant that only very few publications were archived and from 1998 to 2005 only 500 Gbytes worth of publications were archived in total.

In 2005 the Legal Deposit Law was revised again. This time the entire Danish web was included and the establishment and funding of netarchive.dk became a reality. Netarchive.dk is a virtual organization driven by the Royal Library and the State and University Library. Furthermore the Legal Deposit Law also covered online capturing and recording of all Danish radio stations and television channels. The national media archive was placed at the State and University Library. During the last five years this has generated rather huge digital collections. The web archiving program has passed 145Tbytes mainly because of the domain crawling completed two to three times a year, and the national radio and television archive has already passed 500Tbytes of digital video and audio recordings.

Together with large digitization projects at all the major cultural heritage institutions in Denmark the legal deposit digital archives have developed a natural need for digital preservation solutions.

The Royal Library and the State and University Library have both been active partners in Planets, a project co-funded by the EC. The Danish libraries have been involved in many activities from user studies within research communities, research in “Context Aware Digital Objects” to practical tool building and wrapping primarily of tools for characterization and migration actions. Furthermore the libraries have developed a Planets connector for the Fedora Commons repository system used in a currently ongoing internal development project at the State and University Library. The Fedora connector allows repositories based on Fedora Commons to hook up directly to the Planets interoperability framework thus bringing preservation functionality to the repository system.

Towards the end of Planets a number of organizations founded Open Planets Foundation (OPF – see the last issue of What’s New) and both national libraries in Denmark are founding members of the organization. Furthermore the State Archives has joined OPF, so Denmark is rather well represented, at least compared to the size of our country. We believe in and hope for the sustainability of the good results of Planets and believe that OPF is exactly the right framework for ensuring that.

Aside from the work done and the knowledge gained in Planets State and University Library participated in another EC-funded project too; Digital Preservation Europe (DPE). In this project we investigated many aspects of digital preservation – from legal issues of European digital repositories to the creation of the DRAMBORA audit framework for digital repositories.

During 2009 the two libraries and the State Archives ran a strategy project funded by the Danish Ministry of Culture. This project aimed at defining a strategy and architecture for a nationwide bit preservation facility. The project ended in December 2009 with a one day conference where the results were presented to a broad range of cultural heritage institutions in Denmark as well as invited people from Scandinavia. We had the pleasure of having David Rosenthal from LOCKSS give an introduction to the challenges of preserving bit streams over time.

In late 2009 the Danish Ministry of Culture decided to fund three different projects under the umbrella of digital preservation. All three projects have now started and will run till the end of 2011.

The first project is the actual implementation and establishment of the nationwide bit preservation facility. During the project phase the work will be carried out in collaboration between the Royal Library, the State and University Library and the State Archives but it is possible that other institutions or solution providers might take active part in the setup, once the project switches into a regular service from 2012. The project builds on the results of the earlier strategy project as well as all the knowledge accumulated within the participating institutions by running large storage facilities for several years. The final setup will be offered to other institutions on a commercial and/or non-for-profit basis. The project was disseminated and awarded for a paper at this year’s ICDL ^[1].

The second ongoing project is about cost models for digital preservation. The project builds on the British LIFE2 projects and tries to use the results of LIFE2 in a Danish setting and take the cost model of LIFE2 even further. This project is also collaboration between libraries and archives.

The third and last ongoing national project aims at building a national knowledge base about digital preservation. A web portal will be launched in its first version in November 2010. This knowledge base will collect and disseminate knowledge and information about digital preservation to a Danish audience – primarily within cultural heritage institutions but also to other bodies within Denmark interested in or faced with the challenges of digital preservation and limited in-house expertise. This project will naturally collate international research and results and present these in a condensed form in Danish as well as present the work and experience of the national institutions working with the topic. As with the first two projects both national libraries and the State Archives are involved together with the Danish Film Institute.

Since Denmark is a small country we are always interested in sharing knowledge, experience, best practices, tools, and systems so the systems or tools technically developed by us are normally released as open source as we have done with many things in the past – e.g. the web archiving tool set: NetarchiveSuite Netarchive Suite.

We expect to disseminate results from the national projects on relevant conferences in 2010 and 2011 as well as through other relevant channels – e.g. mailing lists. For questions, comments or request for more information please feel free to contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.