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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.

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.

On 1st December Malcolm Todd of The National Archives gave a good account of the work he’s been doing on File Formats for Preservation, resulting in a substantial new Technology Watch report for the DPC. It was a seminar hosted by William Kilbride, with participants from the BBC, the BL, NLW and others. The afternoon was useful and interesting for me since I teach an elementary module on file formats in a preservation context for our DPTP courses.

My naïve thinking in the area has been characterised by the assumption that the process is rather static or linear, and that the problem we’re facing is broadly the same every time; migrate data from a format that’s about to become obsolete or unsupported, onto another format that’s stable, supported, and open. MS Word document to PDF or PDF/A…now that, I can understand!

In fact, I learned at least two ways of thinking about formats that hadn’t occurred to me before. One simple one is costs; some formats can cost more to preserve than others. This can be calculated in terms of storage costs, multiplied over time, and the costs associated with migrations to new versions of that format. Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ll know from our previous posts, ULCC welcomed 22 international students onto its October session of the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) in London to learn about the essentials of policies, planning, strategies, standards and procedures in digital preservation. Attendees came from across the UK, as well as Germany, Portugal and the Republic of South Africa: we not only had the most international mix of students to date, but also welcomed the highest number of students this year onto the autumn session of the course.

Following up his excellent interview with William Kilbride at DPTP in May, this time Frank Steiner conducted video interviews with some of the DPC students and scholarship winners – hopefully you can see them below:

I spent some of Friday at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for the launch of the Fürer-Haimendorf Photographic Archive, a JISC-sponsored digitisation project that makes available the fantastic collection of photographs of tribal cultures in South Asia and the Himalayas taken by Christoph von Fürer Haimendorf between the 1930s and the 1970s.

This is just the first phase of the rollout, not only of Fürer-Haimendorf’s pictures, but also of many other valuable collections at SOAS. We are pleased and excited to have been able to assist with this endeavour, by customising EPrints to meet the extensive requirements set out for the system by Susannah Rayner and Malcolm Raggett, who are leading the project at SOAS. No less than with Linnean Online, it is a rare privilege to be associated with a project giving a new impetus, and worldwide access, to such invaluable historically important, archival collections.

SOAS organised a fascinating series of lectures Read the rest of this entry »