What's New - Issue 28, August 2010

IDCC 2010 –Call for Papers Extended
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/conferences/6th-international-digital-curation-conference/papers
We are pleased to announce that the Paper Submission date for IDCC10 has been extended by 2 weeks. The Call will now close at 1700 BST on Monday 9 August 2010.

Climate change data to be opened up
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/07/data.aspx
Climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) will soon be demonstrating new methods of providing open access to research data thanks to a major new investment from JISC to improve the way UK university researchers manage their data

International Journal of Digital Curation, Issue 1, Volume 5
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/news/international-journal-digital-curation-issue-1-volume-5
The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue 1, Volume 5 is now available. It contains of 11 peer-reviewed papers drawn from 3 different events; the 5th International Digital Curation Conference, iPRES 08 and iPREs 09 (International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects). There are also 4 general articles.

JISC Podcast: Digital Economy Act advice for universities and colleges
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/07/podcast109digitaleconomyact.aspx
The controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 has generated much public debate, and the implications for colleges and universities remain unclear. The Act aims to tackle online copyright infringement by giving Ofcom, the communication industry regulator, new powers to deal with it. JISC is advising all institutions to consult the Ofcom codes by 31 July 2010 and to start preparing now to understand the implications of the law. Nicola Yeeles from JISC spoke to Kirsty McLaughlin, legal information specialist at JISC Legal, to find out what the new Act could mean for those who work and learn in universities and colleges.

Times Higher Education discusses implications for data release, arising from a recent ruling by the Information Commissioner's Office on tree-ring data, and the Russell Report on the "Climategate" emails affair
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=412475&c=2
The THE article interviews Michael Baillie the emeritus professor of palaeoecology at Queen's University Belfast, recently forced to release his career-spanning dataset in response to a FOI request, following the Information Commissioner's ruling that the Environmental Information Regulations applied to the case and the data could not be exempted.

Incremental project report released
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/preservation/incremental/IncrementalProjectReportJune2010.pdf
The JISC-funded Incremental project has released its scoping study into researchers' data management needs at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow.

What will the new Public Data Transparency Principles mean for researchers and HEIs?
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/news/what-will-new-public-data-transparency-principles-mean-researchers-and-heis-0
The DCC’s Angus Whyte explores what the new Government's Public Sector Transparency Board’s draft set of Public Data Principles mean for research data and HEI's.

CLOCKSS adds its 11th archive node worldwide
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.clockss.org
CLOCKSS is very pleased to announce that it has added an eleventh archive node to its network of worldwide, redundant, and distributed archive nodes. The new node is hosted at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan, Italy.

Collections Trust Response to Government
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.mla.gov.uk/news_and_views/press_releases/2010/mla_gov_announcement
The Collections Trust has prepared a response to the Government announcement that the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) will cease operation by April 2012.

ULCC wins Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2010/07/09/open-repositories-2010-in-madrid/
ULCC's e-repository experts Richard Davis & Rory McNicholl have won the Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 2010. The full details have been nicely summarised by Richard Davies, in his blog post over at ULCC's Digital Archives blog (dablog) and there is also a video of their presentation in Madrid.

Digital Preservation and Electronic Records Management for CPD
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/cais/cpd/
There are still some places left on the following accredited distance learning courses offered by the Centre for Archive and Information Studies (CAIS) at the University of Dundee. The courses are tutored by experts and delivered online via an interactive, fully-supported, virtual learning environment. Further details of the courses are listed below. Please note that the closing date for applications is the 13th August with courses beginning on the 20th September.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/newsletter/201007.pdf
The July 2010 issue of the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available.

I2S2 Requirements Report available
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/I2S2/
The Requirements Report for the I2S2 project, together with the final Lifecycle Model and a supplementary report are now available from the project website.

UKRDS Report available
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.ukrds.ac.uk
The UK Research Data Service project has completed its proposal and management summary which can now be found in the reports section under the documents tab at the UKRDS website. Our recommendations focus on two key needs: The first is embedding skills and capability within HEIs and we have included a modelling tool to help institutions with planning and costing the establishment of capability. In our judgement this approach is the best option to provide a scalable, sustainable and efficient organisational infrastructure to allow researchers to exploit a range of storage and curation services to manage their data effectively and to gain access to other data of good provenance. The second need is for national co-ordination to maintain coherence of approach and to foster the development of common tools, standards etc. within the international context.

PARSE.Insight reports now available
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.parse-insight.eu/publications.php
After two years of research, the European project PARSE.Insight held its final symposium on 25 June 2010. Ten major insights in research were presented, amongst these major gaps between European countries in how to deal with research data and researchers' reluctance to share their data while they certainly want others' data. These findings were enforced by the outcomes of three case studies in High-Energy Physics, Earth Observation and Social Sciences and Humanities.

The NISO I2 Working Group has released a midterm report
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/i2/midtermreport/
The NISO I2 WG is soliciting feedback on the report and guidance for the next steps in developing this standard from individuals and groups involved in the digital information transactions. Stakeholders include publishers/distributors, libraries, archives, museums, licensing agencies, standards bodies, and service providers, such as library workflow management system vendors and copyright clearance agencies. Anyone involved at any level in the distribution, licensing, sharing or management of information is invited to participate. Please read the information below and participate in the evaluation of our midterm work by reading the midterm release document and answering a few questions about each development area. You are the stakeholders for this information standard. We must work to ensure that it meets your needs, so your input is very valuable and important to us.

Ranking Web of Repositories: July 2010 Edition
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://repositories.webometrics.info/
The second edition of 2010 Ranking Web of Repositories has been published the same day OR2010 started here in Madrid. The main novelty is the substantial increase in the number of repositories analyzed (close to 1000). The Top 800 are ranked according to their web presence and visibility. As usual thematic repositories (CiteSeer, RePEc, Arxiv) leads the Ranking, but the French research institutes (CNRS, INRIA, SHS) using HAL are very close. Two issues have changed from previous editions from a methodological point of view: the use of Bing's engine data has been discarded due to irregularities in the figures obtained and MS Excel files has been excluded again.

SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle - white paper
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://sword2depositlifecycle.jiscpress.org
The aim of the paper is to stimulate discussion around introducing more complete treatment of "deposit lifecycle" management of objects in digital repositories, and to propose the next small steps in this direction. There will be a sword workshop during OR10, and we'd like to get some discussion going there about this topic, so if you would like to join us and bring your thoughts that would be fantastic. If you are not going to be at OR10 (or even if you are), please do feel free to share any comments on this list or on the jiscpress instance (where the paper can be downloaded):

Emerging findings from Researchers of Tomorrow study
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/07/generationY.aspx
Emerging findings from the first annual report of a major three-year study into the information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students show that there are striking similarities between students born between 1982 and 1994 and older age groups. Researchers of Tomorrow was commissioned by JISC and the British Library to establish a benchmark for research behaviour, against which future generations can be measured – and also to provide guidance for librarians, information specialists and policy makers on how best to meet the research needs of Generation Y scholars.

Business intelligence for research data curation?
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/news/business-intelligence-research-data-curation
The DCC’s Angus Whyte attended the JISC workshop ‘Gaining business intelligence from user activity data’ and provided some thoughts on the topic.

Portico Introduces New E-Book Preservation Service for Libraries
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.portico.org
Portico is pleased to announce that John Wiley & Sons has entered into an archive license agreement to preserve its collection of more than 8,000 online scholarly monographs. With this agreement, Wiley expands its relationship with Portico, which began in 2006 with Wiley's commitment to deposit their entire list of e-journals to the Portico archive. Wiley joins De Gruyter, Duke University Press, Elsevier, Palgrave Macmillan, SPIE, and Springer in participating in Portico's e-book preservation service, which was introduced to scholarly publishers in mid-2008. The addition of Wiley's 8,000 titles brings the total number of e-books committed to the Portico archive to more than 43,000.

Research Data Management Forum – Draft programme now available
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/research-data-management-forum/rdmf5-economics-applying-and-sustaining-digital-curation
The draft programme for the fifth DCC-RIN Research Data Management Forum - theme: "The Economics of Applying and Sustaining Digital Curation" - is now available via the event webpage.

Jorum Unified Search Tool
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/searchOptions.html
The Jorum Team is pleased to announce the release of a new unified search tool - created to allow you to search the JorumOpen and JorumUK collections simultaneously. This means that searching for resources is now even easier, providing instant results gleaned from both collections at once.

If you build it will they come?
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/use-and-relevance-web-20-researchers
This project looks at the extent of adoption of different web 2.0 tools in different subject fields and disciplines, and the different types of researchers who are using them.

BibApp 1.0 released
Retrieved 1 August 2010 from: http://www.bibapp.org/
BibApp is a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches researchers on your campus or research centre with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas.

How will we know when all our digital preservation actions have succeeded? Here’s an experiment you can try at home.

Take a small metal memory stick in the shape of a key – the one sponsored by Microsoft that they were giving away at the DCC Conference in London in December 2009 – and put it in the breast pocket of a machine-washable Mark’s and Spencer’s suit. Leave it there for a few weeks. Then put the suit (and memory stick) onto a 40 degree wash with biological detergent. Spin. Hang to dry. You should find that stick, data and jacket survive the experience in pretty good shape. I can’t vouch for other sticks, data or couturier: but I’ve done this twice and it’s worked both times.

The problem with digital preservation is that it’s not repeatable. This is what the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet were getting at when they described it as temporally dynamic and path dependent, and they noted laconically that this ‘complicates all other attributes’ of preservation (BRTF 2010, 28). We may balance the demand side; we may eliminate free riders with an ongoing flow of value: but we need to make smart decisions now that will work in the future. It’s easy to tell when it’s going wrong but it’s harder to be sure when it’s going right.

If our work is not repeatable then our plans and the reasoning behind them matter an awful lot. Preservation planning is one of the functional areas of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) which imposes a mandatory responsibility to ‘follow documented policies and procedures which ensure that information is preserved against all reasonable contingencies...’ (CCSDS 2002, 3-1). We’re good at collaborating and we collaborate on more challenging topics all the time so it ought to be relatively simple to share these planning processes. Testing and validating our plans will be a useful way to pass time as we wait for the future to happen.

So it’s surprising that there are not more preservation plans in the literature. It’s hard to find and interpret the very many digital preservation plans that must have been written in the last decade. This is the space most recently occupied by the Planets project – specifically the PLATO planning tool and test bed (http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/plato/intro.html). I will be honest and say that for a while I was quite mystified by Plato. It seemed like a worthy cause but at first inspection the tools seemed so complicated that, rather than putting preservation within reach, they would have the contrary result of making it more difficult. Only now it’s finished has the penny has finally dropped.

Let’s get two unequal criticisms out of the way. Firstly the PLATO planning tool depends on those maddening mind mapping tools. I try so hard to be on the side of the angels but mind maps provoke a sort of visceral rage whose suppression takes more energy than is decent. I spent years learning to read so as not to be patronised or bamboozled by funky little diagrams. I’m not alone in my primitive abhorrence and a small user rebellion will surface before the sales pitch is over. But I’m still humble enough to know that the European Union doesn’t fund projects around my own eccentricities. The smart, well intentioned people behind the project are not doing this to annoy me.

Bigger obstacles are the extents to which thoroughness and flexibility are virtues. Ask yourself this: as it possible to be too thorough, too flexible? People-who-work-in-digital-preservation (we’re still looking for suggestions to replace this word) are used to thinking of everything so thoroughness is mostly a virtue. We’re not necessarily so good at repeating out loud what the gentle voices in our heads tell us. The planning tool forces explicit statements out of you. It questions everything and it makes things into numbers - things that were never numbers before. It makes you step through a formal process of defining requirements, examining alternatives, analysing results, and making recommendations. It asks about objects, technology, users and policies. It asks about repository operations and picks up any number of tools along the way. Along the way it reveals the classes you skipped and the topics have given up worrying about. Few have answers to all the questions and many will be exhausted before those irksome diagrams have given up their dance.

This is the darkness before dawn. Let me put on record that – up to the point that I fished the memory stick out of the washing machine for the second time – that I had missed the point of Plato. It’s great. I love it. Here’s why: you might never actually have to use it.

The tools that help you write a preservation plan are great but they’re not the prize. Anyone interested in ensuring our digital memory is accessible tomorrow ought to sit down and try writing and executing one: failure to do so is evidence of an inexcusable lack of curiosity. But the real prize is the back file of plans that others have written, or are about to write. That should have everyone’s attention. Robust and thorough planning is good for all time zones. It’s good for agencies large and small and it’s not a competition. Digital preservation is dynamic and distributed so it makes sense that we work together. If we all have to write preservation plans, wouldn’t it be good if we could share them with each other? That would lower the barriers for small agencies and mean that communities of interest can form around specialist themes. And if we share our plans won’t it be great if we can follow a broadly similar pattern using broadly comparable variables and based on explicit statements about what we think is important? That way we can adopt existing plans, adapt them or review our own plans in the light of what others have done. It means we can update our plans based on trends others have identified in the interim. And wouldn’t it be useful if the plans were open to scrutiny, and if the empirical evidence on which our decisions are based could be viewed, aggregated and challenged? It would move us from fragmented, ad hoc and secretive plans to integrated, evidence-based, transparent, and dynamic plans.

Let’s be clear: preservation planning is arduous and the PLATO tools don’t relieve us of that burden. But they mean we can do it better, more quickly, in a way that others will understand and in a way that will keep them current.

What’s my point? The Plato planning tool will help you write effective preservation plans. Sharing them with others is to your advantage and everyone else’s too. So, with new confidence, we can set about implementing our plans to the benefit of our real jobs – saving lives, teaching children, being brainy, making profits, cutting carbon, bailing banks, fighting crime, checking pockets for memory sticks: whatever. Success at these tasks will be the lasting measure of our unrepeatable experiment.

Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet (2010) ‘Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long Term Access to Digital Information’, online at: http://brtf.sdsc.edu/, last visited 26/07/2010

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (2002) Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)’ CCSDS Blue Book 650.0-B-1 online at: http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf last visited 26/07/2010

In this section we invite a partner or colleague to update us about major work on their home country that will interest readers. In this issue we hear from ...

Tim Keefe, Head of Digital Resources and Imaging Services, Trinity College Dublin

Ireland has been experiencing a great deal of digitization activity in the past few years. These activities have largely been centered around the institutions of higher learning but there is also growing activity within the government and other public sector institutions such as the National Library, the Oireachtas Governmental Library, and the Digital Humanities Observatory.