In this issue:
- What's On - Forthcoming events from January 2013 onwards
- What's New - New reports and initiatives since the last issue
- What's What - Some Thoughts and Reminiscences of the Past Decade, Maggie Jones
- Who's Who - Sixty Second Interview with Michael Charno, ADS
- Your View? - Comments and views from readers
What's New is a joint publication of the DPC and DCC
What's On
The DCC have a number of events coming up that may be of interest to you. For further details on any of these, please see our DCC events listings at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/. You can also browse through our DCC events calendar to see a more extensive list of both DCC and external events.
NISO webinar: Behave Like a Startup: Adapting Your Organization to Rapid Change
9 January 2013
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/webinars/startup
During a recent BookExpo meeting, a publishing company executive asserted, "Any company that isn't behaving like a start-up is doomed." What does this mean in the context of service organizations such as libraries, as well as businesses that serve the library industry such as publishers and vendors? How can large institutions be more nimble, act more quickly, adopt new tech more easily? What can be learned from startups and what can be avoided? This will answer these questions and more.
Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda - 8th International Digital Curation Conference 2013
14-16 January 2013
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13
International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) brings together those who create and manage data and information, those who use it and those who research and teach about curation processes. Our view of ‘data’ is a broad one – video games and virtual worlds are of just as much interest as data from laboratory instruments or field observation. Whether the information originates in the arts, humanities, social or experimental sciences the issues faced are cross-disciplinary. IDCC13 will be held in mainland Europe for the first time and the Digital Curation Centre are delighted to have support from two major institutions in the Netherlands - Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). IDCC13 is organised by the Digital Curation Centre UK, in partnership with the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and with sponsorship from Microsoft Research.
IDCC workshops announced
14-17 January 2013
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/workshops
There are nine workshops being held in conjunction with IDCC13. More information on the range of events can be found on the International Digital Curation Conference 2013 website.
RSP webinar: "Implementing strategies to encourage deposit
16 January 2013
http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/implementing-strategies-to-encourage-deposit
In this free RSP webinar, Rebecca Kennison, Director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University (USA), will present examples on how to encourage deposits for the institutional repository and how advocacy for deposits can be implemented among the academics. This webinar may be of interest to librarians and repository managers.
Digital Preservation: What I Wish I Knew Before I Started
24 January 2013
http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/50-StudentConference2013?xref=53
The DPC and the Archives and Records Association are pleased to invite students and researchers in archives, records management and librarianship to a half day conference on practical workplace skills in digital preservation. Hosted by University College London, and organised in partnership with the Universities of Aberystwyth and Dundee, this mini-conference will bring a select group of leading practitioners together with the next generation of archivists, records managers and ibrarians to discuss the challenges of digital collections management and digital preservation. In a lively set of presentations and discussions, each of the speakers will be invited to reflect on 'the things I wish I knew before I started', or 'what I actually do all day' giving students an advantage in their own career development, and helping those who frame the curriculum a chance to extend their students' readiness for the workplace.
Collaborative Approaches to Managing File Formats – a day of action
28 January 2013
http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/51-file-formats-day-of-action?xref=54
This DPC ‘Day of Action’ will introduce a range of recent initiatives in this domain and it will provide a focussed burst of activity which will be of benefit to all with an interest in digital preservation. Participants will be invited to bring problem files with them, and to work with experts in the field to catalogue problems and develop tools to help characterise and manage them. Participants will:
- Be updated on a range of recent activities in file characterisation and format registries
- Have an opportunity to support the development of file format registries
- Be shown how to develop and supply signature information for characterisation
- Encourage collaboration on shared challenges in managing diverse or ‘problem’ files
- Contribute to a wide ranging discussion about strategic needs
iConference 2013: Scholarship in Action
12 - 15 February 2013
http://www.ischools.org/iConference13/2013index/
The iConference is an annual gathering of scholars and researchers concerned with critical information issues in contemporary society. iConference participants advance the boundaries of information studies, explore core concepts and ideas, and create new technological and conceptual configurations—all situated in interdisciplinary discourses. These issues will be addressed during our four-day event in Fort Worth, Texas.
Video Games and Learning Symposium
28 February 2013
http://gameslearning.eventbrite.co.uk/
Game-based learning – ranging from the deployment of bespoke educational games in schools to the use of commercial off-the shelf (COTS) titles to support learning – is an area of increasing interest for educators, researchers, games developers and policy makers, who see the potential of video game technology to motivate and educate learners of all ages. We are delighted to welcome three excellent speakers, each of whom will give their unique perspective on the broad topic of game-based learning, and related issues. The symposium will finish with an opportunity to discuss the themes and ideas raised in the speaker sessions.
SPRUCE Hackathon Leeds: Unified Characterisation
11th-12th March 2013
http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/SPRUCE+Events
This is a developer only event that will focus on bringing together and enhancing existing tools for characterising and assessing digital collections. It’s a chance to get involved in some exciting open source projects and work with top techies from the field. In previous events, our practitioners have identified a need for better characterisation tools so this event will be an opportunity to advance an array of solutions to meet those use cases. We’ll have developers from all the big characterisation tool projects in the DP field joining us, so this is a great chance to advance your knowledge and also contribute to some essential development work.
What's New
For more information on any of the items below, please visit the DCC website at http://www.dcc.ac.uk.
Saving the digital decade: DPC awards organizations helping to safeguard our digital memory
http://www.dpconline.org/newsroom/latest-news/945-saving-the-digital-decade-dpc-recognizes-major-accomplishments-to-safeguard-our-digital-memory
At a prestigious ceremony on Monday evening the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) celebrated its tenth anniversary by recognising initiatives and individuals from around the world that have made an outstanding contribution to safeguard digital resources for the future. At the DPC’s Digital Preservation Awards, which took place at the Wellcome Collection in London, three agencies received awards for their exceptional contribution to ensuring the long-term security of digital collections: the University of London Computer Centre for their pioneering and popular ‘Digital Preservation Training Programme’; the PLANETS project for its ground-breaking and innovative technologies; and the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York for its outstanding work securing valuable but vulnerable research data.
Announcing the Data Curation Profiles Directory
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dcp/
Purdue University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of Data Curation Profiles Directory, a new serial publication edited by Jacob Carlson & D. Scott Brandt. Data Curation Profiles (DCP) are in-depth publications which provide detailed descriptions of research data sets and collections. The DCP, and the associated Toolkit which provides instructions and advice on composing them, are the results of research funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Third SCAlabale Preservation Environments (SCAPE) newsletter now available
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=20cef0f757e3840df2769745b&id=87d150c03f
SCAPE is an EU-funded project which directs towards long term digital preservation of large-scale and heterogeneous collections of digital-objects. It aims to develop scalable services for preservation planning and preservation actions on an open source platform. These services will be based on a framework for automated, quality assured work-flows, which will be elaborated and tested during the project runtime. A policy-based preservation planning tool and an automated watch system will ensure a secure and targeted implementation of the preservation strategy.
Introduction to the Digital Preservation Directory and an invitation to join
http://daconnect.wikispaces.com/How+to
The National Archives has been developing a platform for archives across the UK and Ireland to share information of their digital preservation activities with one another. The directory, DigitalArchivesConnect, is in the form of an open source wiki. This simple format allows users to add a profile of their organisation and its involvement in digital preservation, and to update and maintain their information. We invite you to submit your own profile.
Simmons GSLIS Online Digital Stewardship Post-Master's Certificate Now Accepting Applications
http://www.simmons.edu/dsc
The Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science is now accepting applications for the second cohort in the post-master's certificate program in Digital Stewardship.The Digital Stewardship Certificate (DSC) is a fully online, five-course, post-master's program that imparts the concepts and skills needed to create and manage a sustainable digital repository, library or archive. It prepares graduates to manage digital objects over time through active, ongoing oversight of the total environment (content, technologies, and user expectations).The DSC can be completed in either three or five semesters. The first course, Digital Stewardship, will be taught in Summer of 2013.
IJDC, volume 7
http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/issue/view/15
The International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC) is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. IJDC is entirely devoted to papers, articles and news items on curation of digital objects and related issues. The journal is published in electronic form, two times a year.Volume 7, Issue 2 of the is now available.
JISC welcomes the launch of Futurelearn
http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=24794
JISC welcomes the announcement by the Open University today to bring together a range of free, open, online courses from leading UK universities through MOOCs (massively open online courses).Professor Martyn Harrow, chief executive JISC said: "The development of Futurelearn aligns with JISC's vision to make the UK the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. We are excited about the possibilities MOOCs offer and are looking forward to supporting the Open University and other education institutions in exploring their benefits."
New agreement concluded regarding management of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempl&templ=121217&uiLanguage=en
In response to the growth that the service has experienced in combination with increased demands for further developments, Lund University concluded during 2012 that a new community-based solution for operating and developing the DOAJ had become timely. Following a series of discussions, the University concluded an agreement with Infrastructure Services for Open Access, C.I.C. (IS4OA) according to which the newly formed organisation will manage the trademark as well as assume operations and development of the Directory of Open Access Journals. Further plans will be announced shortly. IS4OA was founded by Dr. Alma Swan (convener of EOS, co-founder and co-owner of Key Perspectives Ltd. and Director SPARC Europe) and Dr. Caroline Sutton (co-founder Co-Action Publishing and President of OASPA).
Upgrade to SHERPA/JULIET Released
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/
The Centre for Research Communications is pleased to announce the release of an upgrade to its SHERPA/JULIET service, the go-to database of research funders’ open access policies. SHERPA/JULIET now has grown to cover 110 funders. The increase in size has necessitated an upgrade to the JULIET website and the introduction of several new features.
First TIMBUS Newsletter Published
http://timbusproject.net/about/publicity-material/156-timbus-newsletter-volume-1-issue-1
The EU co-funded TIMBUS project (2011 – 2014) addresses the challenge of business process preservation to ensure the long-term continued access to processes and services. TIMBUS builds on feasibility and cost-benefit analysis in order to analyse and recommend which aspects of a business process should be preserved and how to preserve them. It delivers methodologies and tools to capture and formalise business processes on both technical and organisational levels. This includes their underlying software and hardware infrastructures and dependencies on third-party services and information. TIMBUS aligns digital preservation with well-established methods for enterprise risk management (ERM) and business continuity management (BCM).
What's What - Some Thoughts and Reminiscences of the Past Decade
Maggie Jones, Founding Secretary of the DPC
Time is a strange concept. A decade can pass by in what seems like the blink of an eye [especially at my age!] and yet the two and a half year period between my taking up the post at the DPC in May 2003 and establishing the DPC as a fully autonomous enterprise with its own accommodation, furniture and bank account which wasn’t fully completed until late 2005, felt like an absolute eternity at the time. In the meantime, the DPC was formally attached to JISC, which was itself administered by KCL, both in London so the DPC Office, which had a full-time staff of one for the first two years, started life in rented accommodation which had to be negotiated with the University of York. I seem to recall that Carol Jackson and I celebrated our independence with a cup of coffee at the Innovation Centre and after all the blood, sweat and tears it had taken, I’m amazed it wasn’t something much stronger!
Added to that at my very first DPC Meeting, two full members indicated they were thinking of leaving the DPC, it wasn’t a very promising start and I wondered if it might be one of the shortest lived organisations on record. I would have loved to have had a crystal ball back then to see the thriving organization the DPC is now, firmly established within the UK digital preservation community.
There are also many much more positive memories of the early days, not least of the DPC membership organisations whose incredible diversity in terms of size and sector, all committed to a common cause, was always one of the DPC’s great strengths, and remains so. It was a thrill to learn that one of the earliest DPC Members, the ADS [at that time still part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service] has received the DPC Decennial Award for an outstanding contribution to digital preservation. It is also fitting that the awards this year have been split into three different strands, recognising the different categories of contribution required to advance the digital preservation agenda. They include those [like the ADS] who have been successfully grappling with the practicalities of preserving and making available large quantities of digital data for many years; the innovation needed to help assist those efforts, especially in the development of practical tools which will help make digital preservation programs sustainable [for example those developed by another DPC Award winner, the Planets project]; last but not least something dear to my heart, the ongoing requirement for training and awareness raising.
It was therefore equally delightful to see the ULCC [as it happens, also one of the founding members of the DPC] receive an award for the Digital Preservation Training Programme. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the pilot DPTP and subsequent early programmes, which were initially inspired by the University of Cornell’s Digital Preservation Workshop and developed in collaboration with them. Most of those involved in the development of the first DPTP [including William Kilbride, Kevin Ashley, and Simon Tanner] are still very much involved and active in the digital preservation scene. Along with others, such as Neil Beagrie [who as most know, actually established the DPC], and Chris Rusbridge [a former DPC Board member and the first Director of the DCC], there is now a considerable core of experience and expertise built up over the years. This continuity seems to me to be crucially important especially in such a rapidly evolving area such as digital preservation. At the same time it is equally important to nurture and develop new talent and the DPC’s broad membership structure fosters not only the building on existing skills and expertise but also the fostering of new talent and ideas.
The DPTP also seemed to me to epitomize another feature of the DPC I especially admired, that of a collegiate approach. Perhaps because it is such a new and emerging field digital preservation seems to me to be largely and blessedly free of individual egos and there seems to be a genuine sense of willingness to learn from each other and for cooperation and collaboration, the raison d’etre of the DPC. While the blurring of boundaries may have created some confusion and uncertainty, it has also offered enormous scope for new strategic and innovative partnerships.
Congratulations are also due to the PLANETS project and the OPF for their innovative tools and technologies, recognised at the Digital Preservatio Awards and all done with a collaborative research programme. Collaboration has been a strong theme in the last decade of digital preservation. The tools and techniques of preservation have changed considerably in the decade even if the need to work together remains strong.
While ten years does seem like a long time in the digital age, let’s not forget that in the overall scheme of things, it actually isn’t. Enormous strides which have been made in the past decade in building a greater communal understanding of what digital preservation is about; facilitating a more nuanced appreciation of factors such as costs and the pros and cons of different strategies; and also an increasing body of practical experience of preserving digital data. Much has been accomplished over that decade by many people.
There are of course still significant challenges to be faced, which is why an organization such as the DPC remains every bit as important now as it was when it was first thought of. Long may it flourish and hearty congratulations to William, Carol, and the rest of the DPC team for continuing to make the initial goals and aspirations of the DPC a reality.
Who's Who - Sixty Second Interview with Michael Charno, Applications Developer, Archaeology Data Service
Where do you work and what's your job title?
I work at the ADS as an Applications Developer currently, mainly working on web applications and systems, but I was previously a Curatorial Officer doing the nitty-gritty of digital archiving.
Tell us a bit about your organisation
We are a digital archive for archaeological data and hosted by the University of York. We were started in 1996 with 2 staff and a few megabytes of data and have grown into a team of 14 archaeologists, curators and developers hosting terabytes of data and a catalogue of over 1.1 million archaeological records. We also just won the DPC decennial prize.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
Most of my current work is on back-end systems which are probably of little interest to anyone else. However, I have been recently working with our stats software, Piwik, to try and get a better understanding of how users are interacting with our site and provide more useful information to our depositors regarding the usage of their material. Much of this work is feeding into a larger project trying to measure the economic impact of the ADS (and digital archives in general) on the discipline [http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/research/impact].
I also occasionally help out on the SWORD-ARM project [http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/research/swordarm] in which we are building an automated ingest system and SWORD client. This should streamline a lot of the ingest and accessioning processes for us while allowing us to “push” metadata and data to other repositories/archives more easily.
Another project i'm working on when I have the time is publishing some of our material as linked open data [http://data.archaeologydataservice.ac.uk]. I'm also looking into ways of using and integrating other people's linked data (such as the Ordnance Survey and the Library of Congress) into our systems to help more accurately and consistently define our data.
How did you end up in digital preservation?
I got lost somewhere between computer science and archaeology.
What are the challenges of digital preservation for an organisation such as yours?
Getting good metadata for reuse. We often get large and disparate data sets from our depositors, which can sometimes be problematic in acquiring or creating useful metadata. Archaeologists as a group have not always been the best at documentation and metadata creation, so convincing them to provide us with thorough metadata has always required some work. Although since 1996 we’ve undertaken a sustained campaign of harassment for better metadata (only slightly joking here...), so things have gotten much better. The challenge of metadata acquisition is well suited to us as a discipline specific repository though. We’ll lean on the big players to solve some of the complicated technical challenges (like accurate format identification and migration paths), but we are much better at ensuring the meaning and provenance of the data is properly preserved.
What sort of partnerships would you like to develop?
Anyone working in any aspect of digital preservation is a useful partnership since many of the issues and challenges we face are common across organisations. We have a lot of practical experience to share with others and equally could learn a lot from other organisations taking on digital preservation of any kind. More specifically and somewhat selfishly, I’d be interested in collaborating with organisations working with very complex file formats and really big data sets, which i expect will become more of a challenge for us in the future.
If we could invent one tool or service that would help you, what would it be?
An NLP tool which could accurately create useful resource discovery metadata for all of the grey literature, journals, and other documents in our archive. The Archaeotools project [http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/research/archaeotools] undertook creating this kind of tool with some success, but there is still a long way to go. If that tool could also consistently pump out valid PDF/A-1a documents at the end of the NLP processing then there’d be a lot of happy curators in the ADS offices.
And if you could give people one piece of advice about digital preservation ....?
Document all your processes and manage your organisational knowledge in a system such as a wiki. Some of the complicated technical problems we encounter arise very rarely in our day to day archiving, so its often easy to forget what solutions or directions were collectively decided on. Since we document these decisions and conclusions in our wiki we can go back to them and avoid having the same conversations/debates over and over again, although even good documentation doesn't always prevent that.
If you could save for perpetuity just one digital file, what would it be?
An art form that I think is well worth preserving and presents a number of challenges is the video game, so i’d nominate my favourite of all time; Final Fantasy III for the SNES. Included in that file would obviously be metadata thoroughly describing the SNES platform so future re-users could either build the emulator or just print off a new SNES from their 3D printers. Although to effectively preserve a video game “file” you'd also need to crack the software or break the DRM, which also raises some interesting philosophical questions around software, copyright, and reuse.
Finally, where can we contact you or find out about your work?
My email is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and you can find out about mine and all my other colleagues work at http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk. I also occasionally tweet from our @ADS_Chatter account.
Read more...