da blog

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.

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:

Ed Pinsent is giving a presentation on metadata right now. It is always a good session as he works with the class and as always they come up with good stuff. It comes from them, they have the answers!  It seems to reveal more and more about the myriad of ways that people work. How to lure content providers to supply metadata? Is it necessarily a good thing? It was observed by our colleague from the Open University that encouraging people from a consumer/creator perspective worked well and was a positive way of drawing out good metadata. Tagging is another point which came up as people like to tag. Why not allow folk to be creative? Why not allow emotive responses to tagging? What does cloud tagging really reveal? See him in action below:

Ed leading the way