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.

The first article is a lighthearted attempt to find out whether the NDAD archive contains any information about my own hobby, the sport of fencing and investigates the nature of fencing related injuries recorded in the Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance System dataset. In the second article Ed Pinsent investigates the research potential of the Record of Scheduled Monuments (RSM), his article includes an extremely helpful step-by-step approach to assisting users in searching/extracting the best from this dataset. Finally, Joanne Anthony presents a report on a Linnean Society seminar entitled “The Longer, The Better” which highlighted the crucial value of long-term datasets for ecological science and was held as part of the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Robert Marsham, FRS (father of British phenology).

I’ve been an admirer of WordPress for a while now. I think we first looked at it circa 2004, for an internal news management system, when we needed an alternative to falling foul of Movable Type’s new licensing arrangements. (I think MT’s now reverted to free licensing, but their paid-for interim probably did WordPress a huge favour.)

Since then, I’ve used it successfully for DA Blog and several personal projects – not just for blogging, but also as a lightweight CMS. We’ve also seen the rise of WordPress.com, Edublogs, and, closer to home, JISC Involve. It’s favoured by many web illuminati, such as Brian Kelly and Jill Walker. WordPress is definitely on a roll.

As for Number 10, it certainly looks fresher than of old. Earlier news entries have all been imported – not always flawlessly. The earliest entry I can find is from 17th Feb 2000 (about 3 years before the first widely available version of WordPress) – and it’s not “Hello World”. I imagine there is somewhere behind it all a bigger news machine than the usual WordPress Admin interface – but, of course things like that are easy enough to integrate.

With JISC-PoWR in mind, and discussions about web archiving and continuity, it’s interesting to note that, as a result of the switchover, some versions of the Number 10 website in the Internet Archive are now well and truly broken, stylewise at least. Versions collected in The National Archives’ UK Web Archive seem to have fared better. Some of these seem to be based on Internet Archive material, others are part of the European Archive collection: not having looked for a while, I have to say it’s not quite clear where TNA’s UK Government Web Archive ends and the European Archive content begins. Also, a tad confusingly the “Prime Minister’s Office” website seems to be archived as both pm.gov.uk and number10.gov.uk. (The former now resolves to the latter, which may be a small step for Web Continuity.)

It will be interesting to see if the WordPress switch improves the quality of the website in its ongoing archived form, and general preservability (at least, once they sort out a raft of validation errors). Although it’s not without pitfalls for the unwary, I recently found it fairly easy to create an offline snapshot of a WordPress site (complete with valid HTML and CSS too).

I wonder whether The White House or The Kremlin will be next to embrace the WordPress way?

To Westminster yesterday for the Gov 2.0 event organised by OII and POST, held at Portcullis House. (I’d love to have taken my own photos to include, but everywhere I turned there were “No photography” signs, and you know how I hate to break rules.)

The event was in two parts: on reflection I could happily have skipped the first session, in which several erudite professors raked over the well-trodden ashes of government IT disasters. All a bit superficial, really, and little, if anything, that wasn’t just as true 10 or 20 years ago, or that you won’t hear about on any decent project management course. But some of it may still have been news to the Whitehall and BCS elite present.

What I came for really was the second-half, chaired by the charming Earl of Erroll, and which seemed to be where the real meat of “Gov 2.0″ lay.

Jerry Fishenden from Microsoft UK kicked off, describing a typically Microsoft vision of Web 2.0 – that is to say, one that reinterprets the zeitgeist to ensure there’s a shrinkwrapped Microsoft solution to meet the needs of even the most befuddled IT director. In this version of the brave new world, Google doesn’t even get a mention, and we must unreeducate ourselves to say “Internet” not “Web”: presumably Tim O’Reilly’s seminal definition of Web 2.0 – “the Web as platform” – is literatura non grata in the MS empire.

Beginning with an inspirational quote from W. H. Gates III, the presentation went on to illustrate how a young offender might come to a bad end as a result of falling through the cracks between the disjoint systems of education, social, health and justice authorities. If only (Jerry insinuated) they’d had Microsoft’s vision of Internet joinedupness, that poor soul might have been saved. I winced when I saw this, and was glad, later, when one audience member, working in this sensitive area, rightly took him to task.

The best was kept for last: William Heath from IdealGovernment.com, and Tom Steinberg from mySociety.org each in their own way delivered compelling indictments of many of the approaches (laborious systems architecture and project management, inviolable specifications, long and expensive development cycles) venerated in the first session.

William Heath whirled away in a delightfully impassioned exposé of the problems with the traditional approach and the systems it has given us. Government IT systems (and their operators) seem to revel in “a culture of assertive non-listening and spin” leading us up the garden path to the point where “the computer says ‘no’” and officials can wash their hands of the problem. In essence, no one seems to care, listen or ask what we (customers, patients, taxpayers) actually want. Notwithstanding all that painstaking planning with PRINCE, OGC Gateway, and everything that went before, government has failed to lay the foundations of trust in its technological competence, not least in relation to data security.

Meanwhile real people with real needs struggle to get the right information at the right time, and feel as if they have to wring it out of government systems and literature. They have to become ad hoc, amateur experts in the regulations and systems they need to sort out their own lives and the lives of their families – which makes you wonder what we are paying officials for. Can there be anyone who’s wrestled with health, welfare, education, tax or any other government system – online or off – who doesn’t recognise the scenario?

Tom Steinberg went further still: “stop building big projects”, and on the evidence of his own successful projects (mysociety.org, theyworkforyou.com, writetothem.com, fixmystreet.com, planningalerts.com) – some independent, others sponsored by government departments for a tiny fraction of what, say, ID cards are going to cost us – it was hard to argue. Tom also developed the No 10 petition system.

You’ll clearly find Tom in the bazaar, developing rapidly and agilely, while others are laboriously designing their expensive cathedrals. Tom’s philosophy is “just go and do it”, and the best way to do it: see what’s already there, and harness existing functionality effectively (fixmystreet.com, for example, simply uses email to send reports to your local council). Small pieces loosely joined, and all that.

Does any of this have any bearing on us and our projects? I think it does. Tom is an advocate of intelligent reuse and repurposing of data, and his pièce de resistance was a demonstration of mySociety’s latest work on Travel-time maps, which merges house price information (from Land Registry, I assume) with transport information (from TfL’s Journey Planner) and overlays it on a map of London (from OpenStreetMap.org). Using a simple graphic tool, you can quickly see how long your journey to work’s going to take, depending on where you can afford to live, and vice versa.

As with Gapminder, this kind of visualisation is a really exciting, immediate, and meaningful application of statistical and geographical data. Wouldn’t it be great if we could see TNA promoting the reuse of NDAD datasets in a similar way? Why is it always Magna Carta and the Domesday Book that get the sexy expos? Mapping/GIS data and apps are getting cheaper, and NDAD’s many geographical datasets could take on a new life if we could at last give them the map-based interface they’ve always lacked.

So, if you’ve read this far: can you suggest any datasets in NDAD and/or UKDA that, separately or together, might reveal some interesting trends, or look good on a map or graph? Could info in Schools’ Census and Crime Statistics, for example, tell us something new when plotted together, or on a map? Suggestions in the Comments box below, please!