Friday’s CeDAAME dissemination event was also an opportunity to be reminded that ULCC’s Digital Archives team has contributed in other ways to the success of SOAS’s team, directly and indirectly. Julie Makinson described how SOAS used the AIDA digital asset assessment toolkit in developing their strategic approach; and many of the SOAS team are alumni of the DPTP: so Ed and Patricia have also had their part to play in supporting SOAS’s digitisation efforts.

The presentations at SOAS were extremely interesting, describing the full range of activities of a multi-faceted digitisation programme, from the development of the strategy (using the aforementioned AIDA) to the many challenges of digitising Islamic manuscripts and related materials.

How, for example, do you reliably OCR pages of centuries-old text with mixtures of Arabic and Latin/English/French? The answer is that sometimes rekeying is unavoidable. We learned, too, that Yale used UKOLN’s DC Dot Dublin Core editor to create their metadata for Islamic collections (and then convert to TEI). Thanks to the native DC and Unicode support in EPrints, SOAS metadata (in English and Arabic) was created and managed directly in the repository. Metadata exchange between Yale’s Fedora-based system and SOAS’s EPrints system seems to have been achieved effectively – I know Rory worked closely with SOAS and Yale on this.

And I sensed genuine excitement in the room when the page-turning interfaces for viewing the books online were unveiled: both very impressive. (For SOAS Rory has been working long and hard on adapting the open source book viewer used by the Internet Archive, and ensuring that the right-to-left reading and page-turning functionality works smoothly.) We also learned about a variety of different approaches to the issues of managing and funding digitisation and cataloguing activities: with my work on the Mediawiki-based Transcribe Bentham project in mind, it was particularly interesting to hear about University of Michigan’s Collaborative Cataloguing initiative.

All in all an exciting day, and particularly satisfying to see close-up the kind of synergies that exist across all of the activities of ULCC’s Digital Archives and Repositories Team. In addition to further enhancing the SOAS Digital Archives system, we are also looking forward to working with them on their JISC-funded Engaging Overseas Communities project, which is going to involve hooking EPrints up to mobile phones in Africa and Asia.

As if that wasn’t enough, at lunchtime I also dashed over to the School of Pharmacy, where Jean, Neroli and Michelle had kindly organised a lunchtime meeting for the University of London repository managers in the LEAP consortium. It was an opportunity for me to unveil a preview of the new SHERPA-LEAP website (with added social networking goodness, courtesy of WordPress/BuddyPress) that we expect to launch very shortly.

It was a nice way to round off a week in which the Team also achieved significant milestones in our work on preservation metadata for the Parliamentary Archives and strategic development for The Women’s Library, began planning for the next DPTP course, and we received news that the FP7 BlogForever project, which will see us collaborating with Warwick, HATII, CERN and others until 2013, has received its final sign-off from the European Commission.

I took my results to a Workshop in Bristol on November 3rd to give a presentation to the numerous Project Managers who are taking part in the JISC Managing Research Data programme. Besides my ally Dr Takeda at the IDMB Project who has supported me since January, it seems one or two others had tried out AIDA, or at least looked at it, and generally found it helpful or potentially helpful. My graphical expression of the five stages – to which I have added more layers of “semantic meaning” – seemed to go down well with Chris Rusbridge. When designing this new version, I layered in a lot of detail from numerous sources, not least of them being existing questionnaires and published guidance on managing research data; when you combine that with the original AIDA elements which included organisation-wide surveys based on Trusted Digital Repository models and digital preservation capabilities, you get quite a complex matrix. One project immediately spotted that in its current form, AIDA would take a very long time to complete.

Many useful things came up in discussion: (1) if you undertake an AIDA, who is going to complete the assessment? I’ve been clear from the outset that no-one person can do it all, and that you’d need to farm out bits of it or work collaboratively, but so far it’s been tested by records managers, some of whom have a good rapport with their IT managers. As regards research data in a University, who is best placed to help, and how many of them are needed? Perhaps the Finance department, the sysadmins, the people who run the IT procurement programme, and people who design and implement policies for the University. Plus, of course, taking into account the assessments from the Researchers themselves. I think this is certainly going to help us model the all-purpose IDMP tool, if we can be quite clear about who is responsible for providing answers, and evidence, for each element in each of the three legs. This would potentially translate into a wide range of user types who can log in to use the tool and perform the assessment.

Lesson (2) – the numerical scoring method I am currently aiming at may not be the best one for some users. Blueprint started to count up their responses and think about calculating averages, but then decided instead to go for a qualitative approach rather than a quantitative one. The reason for this is that the actual difference between the Five Stages has (in their experience) an error bar of 50%. So their results (though I haven’t seen them) are presumably more in the way of a prose narrative describing how well things are working, rather than a numerical score marking and grading the outcome. Where this leaves the Five Stages scale, I’m not sure, but it could probably still work as an indicator.

(3). My AIDA structure has a two-level split that allows assessment of the entire University and (underneath that) a Department, School, Research Group or Project. To this level, I may need to add another unit called ‘Centre’. Apparently a Centre in a University is a bit like a Department, except it specialises in a particular strand of research. When it comes to the actual research data the funding streams are different and more complex. This is good for the researchers, but it also makes it much harder to pin down ownership of the data, and who is ultimately responsible for it.

The theme of the day in Bristol was costs, benefits and sustainability. These are areas I think AIDA can help with in a basic way, but I also think they are better expressed through the matrix which Neil Beagrie is developing within his Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) framework. I took notes at one of the workshops where this matrix was discussed, and learned a lot more about research data in many contexts; my impressions might make another interesting post.

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.

Some of us at ULCC, and over 100 other people from around the UK, spent a couple of days this week at the Aston Business School reviewing the outcomes of JISC’s repositories and preservation programme and looking forward to what comes next. It was a useful and stimulating couple of days – the best programme meeting I’ve attended so far. The few projects that weren’t represented at the meeting missed out in a lot of ways. If you’re involved in a JISC project, make sure you, your project manager, or both of you go to a programme meeting when you are invited. You’ll learn a lot, make some useful contacts, save some time, get some useful ideas and possibly lay the groundwork for future projects or collaborations.

I began the day by chairing the final meeting of RPAG(the repositories and preservation advisory group.) We had a short meeting mainly to follow up on discussions we had been having on how the group had operated and how JISC might make use of advisory bodies in future. Those who expressed an opinion all felt it had been useful to them, but we all had concerns about how our time, and the JISC Executive’s time, might have been used more effectively. Future advisory groups may try to split responsibility for some areas into smaller working groups. All were agreed that the face-to-face meetings were invaluable, but we weren’t all agreed on which online technology would be best to use in between times. Enthusiasts for tools like ideascale were matched by those who found them unusable.

The meeting proper opened with some background and perspective from Rachel Bruce and Neil Grindley of JISC and myself. I tried – partly seriously, but without much expectation of accuracy – to give a one-line summary of what each project set out to do. But there were two things I meant to say which I failed to do. One was to look forward to the theme of day 2 (Value) and stress that repositories are not ends in themselves, but need to be thought of in terms of value, impact and benefits to someone. The second point I omitted was to remind us that , for innovation projects, failure in one sense can still mean success, as long as we understand the nature of the failure and are able to use it to improve and adapt future work. Not achieving what you set out to do is disappointing. Analysing the reasons for that and making sure others are aware of them can be of great value.

But it was the rest of the event that provided greatest interest. The discussion sessions on text mining, research data, teaching and learning repositories and more; presentations from projects from stakeholder, developer and other perspectives; posters and demos from many of the projects; and the fever of activities in the ideas room, which deployed technology ranging from post-it notes upwards to catalyse, capture and refine ideas from the attendees. These activities gave the event much more of a participatory feel – everyone became a contributor rather than being a consumer.

I learned a few things over the course of a day or two, most of them unexpected. David Flanders (via Chris Rusbridge) passed on the neat idea of feeding funding proposals through Wordle before marking them. That’s what ULCC’s AIDA project looked like. Perhaps you ought to try the same with your proposals prior to submitting them?

I learned that talking unprepared and unscripted to a video camera doesn’t produce great results unless you’ve had practice or training – neither of which I’ve had. I knew that in an abstract sense and now have the unfortunate experience to back it up. But Andy McGregor and Dave Flanders did capture some other people talking far more sense than I did and far more clearly, and you can see the results on the dev8D youtube channel.

Andrew Prescott’s overview of the Welsh Repository Network provided us with the surprising finding that smaller institutions are more, not less, likely to want to run their own repository rather than contract it out to someone else.

And via a serendipitous typo, we all contemplated whether working in a repositoire might not be an altogether more rarified and sophisticated career option than working with a repository.

ULCC are currently leading a project (sponsored by JISC) called Assessing Institutional Digital Assets, or AIDA. We’re looking for institutions in the HFE sector in the United Kingdom who would like to help us, by participating as a case study for this project.

The idea is that you would complete a guided self-assessment task which we hope will make things clearer in relation to you and your digital assets. We plan to do this around June-July 2008.

For this, we have drafted a self-assessment toolkit which would help determine your institution’s current capacity for digital asset management. It will help you assess your institution’s ability / readiness for digital asset management. Based on that assessment of readiness and maturity, later project outputs will provide recommendations on appropriate steps to take to improve digital asset management for you. (We’re approaching different institutions who are likely to be at different stages of maturity). The toolkit can be found at http://aida.jiscinvolve.org/toolkit/.

The process and the outputs of this project may be of some benefit to you. We think that the tools, guidance and case studies will help institutions understand how to take small steps forward to improve institutional maturity in regard to digital asset management and preservation concerns.

We’re looking to work with the following information experts: records managers, librarians, digital librarians, data curators, repository managers, information managers, digital asset managers, web masters, archivists, and others. Our guess is that there is no single person in the institution who can do the entire self-assessment, so it may turn into a team effort. There is also the possibility of on-site support or remote support from ULCC. We’re able to provide some financial support, via our JISC funding, to a small number of case-study sites.

If you’re interested in participating, we are looking at starting around June or July 2008, depending on availability of yourself and your staff. We expect the work to take an absolute maximum of eight days, but our hope and expectation is that it will be less for many institutions. At this stage, we are looking for participation from UK Higher Education institutions only, although comments from others are welcome.

Further information is available at our project website.

Contacts: Ed Pinsent (e.pinsent@ulcc.ac.uk) / Patricia Sleeman (p.sleeman@ulcc.ac.uk)