DPC Featured Project

The aim of this series is to highlight some of the DPC member projects listed in the DPC Members' Projects Table

In the third of the series, Rory Mcleod, Preservation Manager, Collection Care The British Library and LIFE Project Manager, was interviewed by Najla Semple about the LIFE Project.

Published 04 May 2006

LIFE Project

What does the LIFE project aim to do?

The aim put simply, was to apply a method of analysis and evaluation to a variety of digital collections to extract costs.
The LIFE project has developed an existing lifecycle methodology to achieve this and has enabled costs to be identified for digital material. It has compared three very different digital collections, from two institutions, namely University College London Library Services and The British Library, and has applied this lifecycle approach to each. From this analysis of the collections and by applying a lifecycle approach costs have been able to be applied to each stage of a digital objects' life.

How does it apply to digital preservation?

Preservation is one of the six identified stages in the lifecycle. By identifying the stages and applying cost, you can begin to prepare systems and services for digital preservation. Little work has been done in this area due to the little information we have and the many variables involved but it was felt that practical applications of lifecycle theory to real collections would be a step towards achieving a more accurate cost for digital preservation. The LIFE project hopes to show how you can apply this model to ANY digital collection to give an indicative cost to acquire, store and preserve into the future. The theory then is that the more information you gather, across as wide a range of material as possible, the more accurate the components and the cost of digital preservation become.

Who has been involved in the project?

The project is JISC funded. It was issued under the 0404 call under Institutional Management Support and Collaboration. It is a joint venture between UCL Library Services and The British Library. The importance of this collaborative approach between Higher Education and National Libraries was a key finding in the project. The Project highlighted how different collection policies and workflow can affect lifecycle costs. These differences between institutions are crucial to understand and test if a standard approach to digital preservation is to be achieved.

Why is LIFE important for your individual institutions?

LIFE gives a focus to our efforts to understand digital preservation. What both institutions need is information upon which to base future decisions around acquisition, ingest, metadata, storage, access and preservation and the Project has gone some way to doing this. We found that we have many different internal workflow procedures and funding models between institutions as well as a different role and responsibility within the community. The chosen lifecycle approach was able to capture and address these variations which makes it a key part of our respective future strategies. It also gives us belief that a standardised approach to the management of digital collections is possible across institutions and organisations which of course significantly reduces the risk and the cost as has been highlighted by both DPC and the JISC.

What will be the project outputs?

Firstly there is a full research review of existing lifecycle methods written by James Watson, this work is held in high regard by both UCL and the BL and formed the background to the decision to use a specific lifecycle approach. As well as this there is a full 120 page final report which includes the three full case studies with all the associated data-mining exercises, the background to how we were able to apply costs to these collections, and how each component of the lifecycle mapped to the digital objects. There is also a new Generic Preservation Model which the LIFE project has developed in conjunction with The British Library's e-IS Architecture team which formed a key part of the Project.
For the conference a 12 page Executive summary document has been created with an accompanying CD which holds all the project documentation, so for anyone really interested in this work all the working material is here right down to the spreadsheets that we used to apply preservation costs to collections. All of this information is also available via the LIFE website.

What is the importance of the lifecycle in digital preservation?

Digital preservation is quite a complex subject and like all complex subjects it is much easier to break the problem into categories. The lifecycle approach is a way of thinking about the problem and then applying costs to the relevant area. It is flexible enough that you can apply your own workflow and powerful enough to be tailored to any digital collection.

What are the individual lifecycle steps?

The stages of the LIFE lifecycle are Acquisition, Ingest, Metadata, Access, Storage and of course Preservation.
The Lifecycle steps modelled extremely well to what we wanted to achieve but there was still quite a bit of work to do, particularly with preservation. In order to extract meaningful figures for this aspect Paul Wheatley and the BL e-IS Architecture team created the LIFE Generic Preservation Model to estimate the cost to preserve. This was an important development and enabled LIFE to complete the cycle for the Project case studies.

How important were the case-studies for the project?

Vital, we simply could not have made any meaningful progress without this real data. Digital preservation can be highly theoretical and we specifically wanted to prove that practical work could be done by using real life collections. The problem as we discovered is that so little information has been collected. We used the BL collections of Voluntary Deposit of Electronic Publications (VDEP) and Web-archiving alongside UCL e-journals to give a robust challenge to the model. VDEP is a digital collection of over 230,000 files deposited over five years in a variety of formats, Web-archiving is two years old and archiving 1000 sites a year, whereas e-journals the third case-study represents the challenges faced by Higher Education Libraries by analysing a sample of UCL Library Services collection of over 12,000 e-journal titles. Each of these examples was able to be analysed under the chosen lifecycle approach and key information extracted, for example; in year one the lifecycle cost for an e-monograph is £15, a new website is £21 and an e-journal is £206.
However in all examples we are still dealing with collections that are only 2-5 years old, the more time that passes and the more our collections and knowledge grow the more data we will be able to extract and therefore the more accurate our costs will become. LIFE believes strongly in this practical approach and any future work would most likely be based around further case-study work.

What was the importance of the legal deposit bill in the project?

The legal deposit bill is crucial to copyright libraries such as The British Library, legislative changes to cater for electronic legal deposit is an area where Government is working with The British Library and other industry leaders to address future needs. In order to obtain as much knowledge as possible around electronic legal deposit the VDEP collection was begun in 2001. This voluntary deposit source gives us an idea of how much and what type of electronic data we are likely to receive. In turn this gives us the information we require to build repository systems and develop preservation strategies. LIFE chose VDEP specifically so we could do data-mining and analysis of a collection that will be crucial to identifying our future requirements for legal deposit. The LIFE work on this collection is expected to be adopted and continued by The British Library's VDEP team.

Why is costing of digital preservation so important?

Without this important piece of information true comparisons between analogue and digital collections cannot commence. At present we can compare acquisition, metadata and possibly storage under like for like conditions but we cannot compare costs to ingest, access or preserve easily. The LIFE project has been able to show that this is now possible, how important this will be is hard to say, but it feels like a significant step in the right direction. Business modelling and funding needs to be better informed in this area and the hope is that this work will lead to clearer information to base funding decisions on.

How will this project contribute to the preservation field as a whole?

The preservation field covers many areas; from climatic conditions, deterioration of materials through to safe storage and access. Traditionally preservation is seen as an analogue paper or object environment. However more and more our collections are growing in the area of digitisation and electronic publishing, the way the world creates and stores information as well as how we conduct research is changing. The LIFE project is a small step on the road to understanding just how we are going to adapt to this change in environment and how much it is going to cost to store and preserve long-term our future digital collections.

Anyone interested in LIFE and its findings can look over the full Project report either on the LIFE website* or by requesting a printed copy. (please contact rory.mcleod@bl.uk).

Update 06 August 2007
Project Report no longer available on the LIFE website.

A DPC summary of the presentations given at the LIFE conference, British Library, 20th April 2006 is also available ( LIFE summary).

*Please note the website will be updated throughout May with the final reports.