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Last Monday (2009-11-23) saw DPC members travel to Edinburgh for a board meeting and for the annual general meeting of the company. We elected a new chair – Richard Ovenden – and offered our thanks to Bruno Longmore for the effective leadership he has offered as acting chair following the departure of Ronald Milne for New Zealand earlier this year.

We had a brief preview of the new DPC website, which promises to be a much more effective mechanism for the membership to engage with each other and the wider world, and confirmed recommendations emerging from a planning day earlier in November which should keep the DPC busy (and financially secure) for a few years to come.

Finally, we had an entertaining and thought-provoking talk from Professor Michael Anderson. Professor Anderson touched on many issues relating to digital preservation from his research career, past and present. He mourned the loss of Scottish census microdata from 1951 and 1961, painstakingly copied to magnetic tape from round-holed punch cards for 1951 and standard cards for 1961, which had to be destroyed when ONS realised the potential for inadvertent disclosure of personal information. But more tellingly, he described the loss, or partial loss, of data closer to home for him, and which has implications for research publications underpinned by data. For a spreadsheet of fertility data for Scotland, no copy survives of the raw underlying data although many derived and aggregated copies exist. For other material, the data is still available but he is slowly losing the ability to do what he wants with it, as applications designed for 1980s-era Macintosh systems find it more and more difficult to operate properly under contemporary operating systems.

These problems are frustrating for specialists to hear about because we know they could have been resolved easily and cheaply if intervention took place early enough. The spreadsheet has been lost, it appears, because it seemed to difficult to access after one change of technology, so its owner simply destroyed it. The primary problem here, then, is one of advocacy rather than technology.

Professor Anderson also talked of two familiar barriers to the deposit of research data: the unwillingness to deposit data seen as being insufficiently polished for re-use, and the lack of reward or recognition for data depositors, as opposed to those who publish papers based on the data. Although he didn’t offer answers, he did make clear that this is a problem which has been with us for a long time. He ended with a plea to librarians and others to ensure that the type of publication he wants to produce now – such as publications containing actionable data – can be preserved and accessed in future more easily than some of the data that’s already been lost.

I had to leave shortly after a lively discussion had begun, which was a shame, As well as reassuring Professor Anderson that the 1961 census microdata were safe, I would have liked to thank him for his work in initiating the Research Support Libraries Programme (of which Ronald Milne was the director) which provided the funding to establish AIM25 – a service that’s still going strong over 10 years later, and which we’re proud to be involved with.

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