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As an outsider sometimes it feels that reading/hearing about digital preservation research is a bit like reading an article on particle physics.  In fact sometimes lectures on particle physics might be clearer.  The number of acronyms, the amount of jargon per project and also the amount of assumed knowledge can, at times make our subject inpenetrable to many, not to mention boring.

So with this in mind I steeled myself for a few days at the PLANETS workshop in London recently.   At the DPTP we talk a lot about OAIS and I was keen to hear about PLANETS’  ’suite’ of tools developed with the OAIS model and digital preservation in mind. The OAIS model implies a number of flexible preservation workflows so I was looking forward to hearing about what the  PLANETS team had done.

Ross King’s  wonderfully clear session really drew the crowd in.  He set out the business case for digital preservation, provided explanations of the technical elements that make up digital preservation, the technical problems behind preservation; the options available and the decisions that need to be taken. While not taking away from the sheer volume of ’stuff’ being created and which will be created as well as the challenges, it was a very motivational session. Next Clive Billeness drew our attention to the fact that risk is the only real motivating factor when it comes to getting the powers that be in organisations to take digital preaservation seriously. He says that we need to talk to financial planners, CEOs in terms of risk, using the language of risk. Companies are now being asked to keep a ‘living will’ so that they can garantee that they can operate in case of a disaster, ensuring that records needed to operate are kept in a manner which can ensure operations.

So what are these PLANETS tools? I am not going to cover them all but Hannes Kulovits introduced us to PLATO,  PLANETS preservation planning tool.  Preservation planning for digital preservation includes preservation policies, legal obligations, organisational and technical constraints, user requirements and preservation goals. It also describes the preservation context, ‘the evaluated alternative preservation strategies and the resulting decision for one strategy, including the rationale of the decision.’ During the workshop we looked in depth at how to decide on preservation strategies and factors which influence decision making.  Input is needed from a wide range of persons, depending on the institutional context and the collection. PLANETS have also pinned down some essential characteristics for digital objects with regard to their preservation.

I was a bit narked that I didn’t get to actually play with it on my laptop there and then but I have done so since the workshop.  How long this planning process takes place is another issue. This was a bit of a drop for us all, yes planning takes time but that much time?

A quick survey of the crowd by me during and after revealed that some people felt that while they enjoyed initial content they felt that the workshop  wasn’t for them, too technical or too highbrow. I consider myself to be a low to middle brow kind of girl (dp-wise I hasten to add) so was suprised by this as I felt that it was one the clearest events I had been to on digital preservation.  I felt this response was a real pity, perhaps there needs to be more interaction with the groups attending these workshops (one remaining) to gauge receptivity.  I struggle with projects who really cannot communicate their products. I didn’t feel this case here. The Planets Framework is really good and may need definining but I really enjoyed it and look forward to next developments.

Did I mention that we are very excited to be contributing to UCL’s Bentham Transcription Initiative. This is an AHRC-funded project to complete the digitisation of the manuscripts of 18th Century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and transcribe them using a wiki-based collaborative approach. It is being run by the Bentham Project at UCL, with support from ourselves and UCL’s newly-launched Centre for Digital Humanities. You can read an overview of the project on Melissa Terras’s blog.

Obviously, transcription of manuscript materials is an important digitisation activity that can rarely, if ever, be left to computers, in the way that printed texts can be, using OCR. But it’s painstaking and laborious work, and anything that eases the burden is welcome.

The project is already throwing up some very interesting conversations about transcription.  At ULCC we have thought about transcription before, particularly with regard to our ongoing work for the Linnean Society archives, and we hope that there will yet be synergies to exploit. It is a great feeling to be so closely involved with disseminating the work of two such seminal figures as Linnaeus and Bentham.

We’re not naïve enough to think that collaborative web-based transcription is new, but we’ve yet to find any substantial comparable examples. A comment on UCL’s Digital Humanities blog teases us with the prospect of information about other similar projects, but fails to provide even a single link or hint, so is effectively useless: hardly in the collaborative spirit! A more useful lead was Joanne Evans’ link to the National Library of Australia’s Australian Newspapers project, which is crowdsourcing the proof-reading and correcting of OCR outputs, and has an impressive-looking site – I’m sure we’ll be borrowing some ideas from there.

Another useful lead has been from Ben Brumfield of Austin, Texas, directing us to his blog about collaborative manuscript transcription which has been going even longer than DA Blog, and looks like it’s going to make interesting reading. Ben’s recent blog post about a distributed transcription exercise of the US Geological Survey’s Bird Phenology Program includes a link to a training video for volunteers (it even sounds like it’s been recorded in a birdhouse).  In the video we can see a database-form approach to transcription, which is particularly appropriate for transcribing data already entered on structured forms.

For more heterogeneous and free-form texts, such as the Bentham manuscripts, wikis seem to me much more appropriate, being in essence discrete hypertext engines. As for collaborative features, MediaWiki in particular has strong and proven features: there can be few better advertisements for effective virtual, global collaboration and crowdsourcing than Wikipedia.

One thing that is particularly compelling about the BPP video is that it is an excellent example of a thorough approach to online collaboration, giving clear and unequivocal guidance to contributors. Now that screencast tools are so readily available, it’s clear that for many activities like this, video-based instruction is the ideal tool, and often preferable to any number of written instructions. No less than for online teaching and learning environments, the need for effective induction and inclusive management of the online community must never be overlooked.

Greetings. It has been a while. I thought I would give you a bit of an update about what we have been up to at DPTP. Our next DPTP takes place 29th, 30th and 31st of March 2010. We are really looking forward to it and have been updating various aspects of the course.

The Digital Preservation Coalition are also generously giving three, yes THREE scholarships to attend the DPTP. Once again open to DPC members. Remember folks, this can include your institution or your professional association.

Hope to see some of you there!

The AIDA project (Assessing Institutional Digital Assets) has completed its official, funded phase, but it’s gratifying to see interest emerging in the toolkit. We possibly could have done more at ULCC to publicise and sell our work, but our ongoing partnership with the DCC on the current Research Data Management project for the JISC gives us an opportunity to make up for that. One of the planned outcomes of the RDMP work will be an integrated planning tool for use by data owners or repository managers (or indeed anyone who has a digital collection to curate) that will offer the best of DAF, DRAMBORA, LIFE2 and AIDA without requiring an Institution to compile the same profile information four times over. We have already massaged the toolkit into a proof-of-concept online version of AIDA, using MediaWiki, and this clearly signals the way forward for this kind of assessment tool.

I was recently invited to contribute a module about AIDA to Steve Hitchcock’s Keep-It programme in Southampton – encouragingly, he is someone looking into the detail of how repositories could be used to manage digital preservation, and wants input from as many current toolkits as he could get his hands on. My experiences of the day have already been blogged. I thought I would add two other little incidents from the day that I found interesting.

The first was the repository manager whose perception was that assessment of the Institution’s workings at the highest level (for example, its technology infrastructure, business management planning process and implementation of centralised policies) was not really part of her job. So why work with AIDA at all? The main purpose of AIDA is largely to assess the Institution’s overall preparedness to do asset management, and the task of assessment can take an individual staff member (repository manager, records manager, librarian) to parts of the organisation they didn’t know about before. I try and make this sound positive when I encouragingly suggest that an AIDA assessment has to be a collaborative team effort within an organisation. But our friend at Southampton reminded me that people do have these sensitivities and that very often, merely having a repository in place at all represents a hard-won struggle.

The second incident relates to my AIDA exercise, where I asked teams to apply sections of the toolkit to their own organisation. The response fed back by Miggie Pickton was memorable – her team had elected to analyse three separate organisations, applying one AIDA leg (Organisation, Technology and Resource) to each. My initial feeling was that this makes a complete mockery of AIDA, subjective and unvalidated as it might be; what better way to cheat a good score than by cherry-picking the best results across three institutions? However, Miggie’s observations were in fact very useful – and the scores still resulted in a wobbly three-legged stool. It seems that even if they collaborated, HFE Institutions still would not be able to achieve that stability that is the foundation for good asset management.

Beacon cited through fog

Who would have thought that reference management could be so interesting? We spent a  very informative and enjoyable Thursday in snowy Milton Keynes, at the Innovations in Reference Management (#IRM10) event (part of the OU/JISC TELSTAR project). All thoroughly blogged by Owen Stephens, and tweeted by many.

Owen Stephens and Jason Platts of OU described the outputs of the TELSTAR project, which integrates the OU’s Moodle VLE with Refworks. This means that students using the VLE can move seamlessly between their reading lists and Refworks, locating resources, maintaining consistency of style and generating bibliographies easily.

Paul Stainthorp of Lincoln University described some exciting, bleeding-edge uses of Yahoo Pipes to mashup data from Refworks, OPAC, and Amazon. Arguably even more bleeding-edge was the presentation by Euan Adie from Nature Publishing, who showed us Help Me Igor, a reference manager plugin for Google Wave. Speakers from CiteULike and Mendeley also gave us fascinating insights into their respective social-tinged bibliographic management offerings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kevin and I brought to the table the theme of web preservation. With reference to our work with JISC-PoWR, UKWAC and ArchivePress, we reminded anyone who hasn’t heard our spiel already that there are many important, valuable and eminently citable web resources, notably blogs by academic researchers, that are at risk of disappearing – making references to them virtually useless.

Authors may not be responsible for ensuring their readers can access the resources they reference, but we think they should at least give them a fighting chance of doing so! We  therefore proposed that students and researchers should be encouraged to locate and cite copies of web resources in stable web archives (such as the UK Web Archive) rather than “in the wild”.

We also discussed the idea that persistent collections of web resources could be created at the institutional level, whether that were an open archive of blog posts by a university’s researchers, or a closed repository where researchers can store copies of the web resources they cite.

One of the strong themes that emerged in discussion was the need for information literacy/digital skills training at all levels to address current tools and trends in reference management; and to re-assert the purpose, value and nature of citation in online digital environments

An interesting suggestion also made was that reference management tools are becoming a natural part of the environment, just as email has: is provision of specialised applications by universities an “aberration”?

I’m inclined to think not, after all it was clear from the workshop that there’s still a need to support ongoing study and research effectively, and scope to develop and validate new approaches.  Microsoft Word may now include reference management features, but that doesn’t obviate the need to educate people in how to use them effectively, and why.

We’re very grateful to Owen for including us in his programme: this is a fascinating area, where e-learning, libraries, preservation and publishing collide, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it.