Neil Grindley, programme manager at JISC, has kindly passed on details of 5 forthcoming digital preservation projects.

Preservation Tools Projects

15/10 Programme (Infrastructure for Education and Research)
6 Month projects (February – July 2011)
Total project cost = JISC funding up to £60,000 per project + institutional contributions

Projects Summary

AQUA – Automated Quality Assurance
University of Leeds; University of York, The British Library, Open Planets Foundation
Total Project cost – £96,629

Manual quality assurance (QA) of digitised content is typically fallible and can result in collections that are marred by a variety of quality issues. Poor storage conditions can result in further damage due to bit-rot. Detecting, identifying and fixing these issues in legacy digitised collections are costly and time consuming manual processes. The Automating Quality assurance Project (AQuA) will apply a variety of existing tools in order to automatically detect quality issues in digitised collections.

Two AQuA events will bring together digital preservation practitioners, collection curators and technical experts to present problematic digitised collections, articulate requirements for their validation, and apply tools to automate the detection and identification of preservation and quality issues. Strong sustainability, take up and dissemination of project results will be ensured by facilitating cross pollination in events that bring together experts from a cross section of organisations and disciplines, and leveraging OPF’s existing role and expertise in preservation
technology support.

EPIC – Evaluating PLATO in Cambridge
University of Cambridge
Total Project Cost – £58,707

EPIC will investigate ways of improving the preservation services currently provided with DSpace@Cambridge. A key activity of the project will be to explore the feasibility of using Plato and associated Planets tools for preservation planning and relevant preservation activities. It will identify a small number of deposited collections that are at risk and use Plato to investigate preservation options and develop plans for them.

In order to inform the planning and evaluate the results we will engage with user communities, seeking to capture their understanding of the significant properties which must be preserved. While the focus of the project is on preservation planning, we expect to carry out preservation actions on some collections. In other cases experiments will be conducted to identify potential future actions.

FIDO – Forensic Investigation of Digital Objects
Centre for e-Research, King’s College London; Archives & Information Management (AIM) Service, King’s College London
Total Project Cost – £42,301

The project aims to investigate the application of digital forensics to support the curation and preservation of digital information held on computer systems and digital media. The project will evaluate the suitability of digital forensic principles and practices to enable HE archives to meet organisational commitments and legal requirements for maintaining digital records; assess the effectiveness of using open source digital forensic tools to identify, acquire, and analyse digital information; and seek to embed digital forensics tools & techniques into the working practices of the KCL Archives & Information Management (AIM).

KRDS/I2S2 – Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools
UKOLN, University of Bath; University College London; UK Data Archive; Archaeology, Charles Beagrie Ltd
Data Service; OCLC Research
Total Project Cost – £69,810

The project aims to test, review and promote combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Taxonomy and the I2S2 Value Chain Analysis tools for assessing the benefits of digital preservation of research data. It will extend their utility to and adoption within the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation (Neil Beagrie of Charles Beagrie Ltd and Brian Lavoie of OCLC Research). The project will be undertaken in seven work packages that demonstrate and critique the tools, and then create and disseminate the toolset and accompanying materials such as User Guides and Factsheets to the wider community.

SWORD – Software Ontology for Resource Description
University of Manchester; The European Bioinformatics Institute
Total Project Cost – £46,944

SWORD will build on existing work to produce a Software Ontology (SWO) and the workflow for developing and applying the SWO to data. Our primary use case exists in bioinformatics. The life sciences are rapidly producing data; these primary data are then analysed and described using a variety of means. To gain scientific value from these data we need to know how they were produced and analysed; this requires software descriptions. We will seek to engage with a wide variety of organisations and disciplinary areas to validate the work. A controlled vocabulary capturing software tools, their types, tasks, versions, provenance, and so on will help preserve our important scientific data and increase its worth.

The MLA has recently released a principles paper on Supporting long term access to Digital Material.

“At a time when digital formats are increasingly important, it is vital to ensure they are sustainable and accessible over the long term. This is equally the case for materials that originate in digital format, and for those that originate in different forms which are then digitally reformatted.”

The paper, commisssioned by the MLA, was produced on its behalf by Collections Trust, in collaboration with the following organisations:

The National Archives; Heritage Lottery Fund; Archaeology Data Service; The British Library; Collections Trust; Digital Preservation Coalition; Museums Galleries Scotland; Joint Information Systems Committee; UKOLN.

The principles will be supplemented by guidance and other tools to support long term access to digital material across the sector and promoted using a joint advocacy and marketing plan.

Next month I will be presenting at the Approaches to Digitisation Training Day.

The day is being organised by the British Library Preservation Advisory Centre and Research Libraries UK and will be held on Wednesday 9 February 2011 at the British Library Centre for Conservation, London. It aims to give an overview of how to plan for and undertake digitisation of library and archive material; and to preserve the digital objects that are produced.

By the end of the day participants will be able to:

• Explain the benefits of digitising material
• Give examples of the types of materials that are suitable for digitisation
• Identify the issues to be considered when planning for digitisation
• Define what is meant by digital preservation
• Describe the risks to digital objects and explain how digital preservation can address these risks.

I will be presenting on Other sources of information and next steps. My talk will look primarily at digital preservation and explore some of the resources linked to from the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation.

We have now been given the go-ahead for a soft launch of the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation.

Just to reitereate this is the guide that the writing of this blog has documented and contributed to.

It has been written for those working on JISC projects who would like help with preserving their outputs. It is aimed at those who are new to digital preservation but can also serve as a resource for those who have specific requirements or wish to find further resources in certain areas.

The Guide is available at: http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-beg-dig-pres/

The site can be navigated in the following ways:

• Using a the contents list
• Using the index
• Using a tag cloud
• By answering a series of questions
• By considering a series of scenarios
• Through the search facility (top right)
• Using Delicious – over 300 urls have been tagged with jisc-bgdp
• By viewing all the contents online or in a Word document

You can comment on any page on the site, so please do let us know what you think and if there are any resources we’ve missed.

We will promoting the guide over the forthcoming months.

Maybe digital preservation is just a black hole and the best way to preserve the Internet is using paper?

The Paper Internet Project takes the stance that you could do worse than “preserve important bits of our civilization for future centuries using a bundle of paper sealed in plastic“.

Saving the web, one page at a time

They are building a series of time capsules containing photos, music, technical journals, and descriptions of everyday life in Right Now, A.D. The time capsules are buried by volunteers at specific locations all over the world. Each node contains the locations of all the others, forming a network.

So far they have built 3 nodes and have curated the data for dozens more. The work is being funded by donations. Each time capsule of 2,000-4,000 pages costs $40-$60 for printing and $20-$30 for the epoxy. They become more cost-effective as they scale up.

Good idea? What do people think?

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) have just released a new case study – Small Steps: Long View – in its case notes series. The case study is available as a PDF.

The case study, prepared by Tracey Hawkins, looks at the Glasgow Museums approach to its large and growing digital collections. It considers how the museum service turned an oral history headache into an opportunity and describes how some simple steps in addressing digital preservation have created short and long term opportunities for the museums. The museums have used some very traditional simple and well know approaches – creating an inventory, assessing significance and promoting access – as the basis for building confidence to manage the wider challenges they face.

The benefits of digital preservation can be expressed in terms of new opportunities they create in the short and long term. Even relatively simple steps can bring early rewards if properly embedded within the mission of an organization.

The collection of case notes are available from the DPC site.

The latest issue of the Digital Preservation Coalition What’s New (Issue 30, October 2010) is now out.

The newsletter includes a review of iPres 2010 written by William Kilbride. The article mentions the Archiving clouds paper and the Library of Congress presentation on the Twitter archive, among other hightlights.

What’s New is a monthly update on areas of interest in Digital Preservation.

Back in May I wrote about my brain storming session and how I’d got a rough structure in place. I’ve now written the majority of the guide and have a table of contents to share with you.

Although the structure is based on a series of questions the pages are intereconnected and it is hoped that people will be able to approach the guide in different ways: through tags, through an index, as one off answers to a question, as briefing papers etc.

Anyway here is the structure as it now stands – please do let me know what you think.

• Why is Digital Preservation Relevant to my JISC Project?
• Access and Reuse Drivers
• Legal Drivers
• Economic Drivers
• Reputation Drivers
• Responsibility Drivers
• Corporate Memory
• Cultural Drivers
• What are the Particular Digital Preservation Challenges JISC Projects Face?
• Responsibility
• Risk Management
• Cost
• What is Digital Preservation?
• Definition of Digital Preservation
• Definition of Digital Object
• Definition of Digital Deterioration
• Digital Preservation Approaches
• Lifecycle Model
• What Exactly do I Need to Preserve?
• Information Audit
• JISC Project Outputs
• Text Based Information
• Software
• Numerical Information
• Audio Visual
• Emails
• Event Information
• Learning Objects and Teaching Materials
• Web 1.0
• Web 2.0
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Twitter
• Personal Data
• Selection
• How do I Make my Deliverables Easier to Preserve?
• Formats
• IPR and Licences
• Metadata
• How do I Preserve Digital Objects?
• Tools
• Training
• Preservation Strategy
• Preservation Policy
• Can I Offload Digital Preservation?
• Repositories
• External Web Archiving Services
• Institutional Records Management Processes
• Outsourcing
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Case Studies

The @jisckeepit Twitter account alerted me to a really interesting article on downsizing your personal world from physical to digital (Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive). The jist of it is that many people are getting rid of their CD, DVD, and book collections and replacing them with digital versions. On an extreme level this has led to some people getting rid of nearly all of their physical possessions and living a ‘minimalist life’.

The article really struck me on a number of levels. Firstly I have been having quite a few discussions with a friend who is in the process of down-sizing to a smaller house. She’d already sold off her CDs on ebay (after adding them to her MP3 player) but has now gone one step further and got rid off her books too. She can get the informtion she needs off the Web of by using an e-book reader. To many living in a house of clutter this might appeal, personally I’m not quite ready to let go. However we both agreed that on an environmental level any moves away from ‘creating stuff’ must be a good thing.

Secondly, and of more relevance to this blog, there is the digital preservation angle. As @jisckeepit put it “note how rapidly preservation becomes critical…“. In fact there is no mention of ‘digital preservation’ in the article per se but there is recognition that back ups are vital.

“Mr Yurista says he frequently worries he may lose his new digital life to a hard drive crash or downed server. “You have to really make sure you have back-ups of your digital goods everywhere,” he said.“

The article mentions the new role of Data crisis counsellors who help individuals claw back their data: “data recovery services will become rather like the firefighters of the 21st Century – responders who save your valuables.”

Digital Lives

Back in 2007-2009 the British Library carried out the Digital Lives Research Project. The project team, made up of the British Library, University College London and University of Bristol, created a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections.

One of the primary research questions asks How should curators approach selection, preservation and access to personal digital collections? What aspects of existing practice can be applied? What needs to be changed?

The Digital Lives project blog offers some interesting insites. The beta synthesis of the project was released early this year and is available as a PDF (it is a hefty 259 pages long but well worth a read!)

“It is concluded that the role of personal archives in daily life and their research value have never been more profound. The potential benefits to society and to individuals are both deep and far reaching in their capacity to empower research and human well being and advancement….The project has outlined the concept of Personal Informatics to encapsulate the three concerns of digital capture, preservation and utility in the context of personal digital objects, and to embrace the study of digital personal information in all its manifestations.“

So how does preservation of our own digital lives fit in with JISC? The answer is still unclear but as the lines between work and home life, real and digital continue to blur many may feel that the digital preservation thread cuts right the way across.

JISC Keep It

Note the JISC Keep It project aims to enable a diverse range of digital content presented by institutional repositories – research papers, science data, arts, teaching materials and theses – to be managed effectively today, tomorrow and beyond. Their Web site and blog are useful for anyone interested in a repositories role in digital preservation.

The Digital Curation Centre have carried out digital preservation training in the past (for example the Digital Curation 101 course) but they have now committed to running a series of data curation roadshows. These are likely to be very useful anyone involved in digital curation from senior managers to researchers and librarians.

Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade

The DCC Roadshows will comprise of a series of inter-linked workshops aimed at supporting institutional data management, planning and training.

The first will take place 2-4 November in Bath and will be open to participants from Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in the south-west of England. The roadshow will run over 3 days and comprise of a series of day and half day workshops.

For more details see the DCC Web site. Registration will open in September 2010.