Fáilte go Sráid na Banrighinn

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris

Football and digital preservation seem an unlikely combination but on May 15th Ed and I arrived to a slightly damp Glasgow celebrating en masse the end of the football season, to deliver our DPTP north of the border.  There, I am afraid the comparison between football and digital curation ends but it is worth noting that on Monday our students did not consist, in the main of bleary eyed Scots.  As I am myself half Scottish I was looking forward to hearing about the digital state of play in my mother’s country but curiously we had a very international group, many had travelled far from places such as the European Central Bank,  European Commission, PRONI,  and near  such as from the National Records Scotland (who clearly cannot get enough of a good thing as we were with them 4 weeks previous).  The group was very creative who seemed to work well together. I know  I know, we say this a lot but this group seemed to shine for many reasons.  They were keen to work together and shout out about their ideas right from the start. And though being a disparate international group they managed to work together very neatly and develop some great case studies for us.

Internationally (and sometimes nationally!) language has always been a barrier  for communication, but  it is also an enabler  and this is again where we see something such as the OAIS being a useful way of empowering people to be able to communicate with each other, and other professionals.  The DPTP rarely (and rightly so) has students just from the traditional information management world (libraries/archives/etc).  Many people now being redeployed from different parts of their organisation and as such are often unfamilair with the idea/concept of an archive or indeed of the traditional notion of the lifecycle of a document/record. This is where OAIS is very valuable due to the way it which it expresses the way a digital object should be ideally kept and uses a language describe this.

In many of our case studies with OAIS, we often find that many organisations are actually mapping very well to the OAIS which indicates that it reflects  good and real practise when it comes to managing our digital repository. Our job in the DPTP is to take someone who has never heard of the OAIS (suprisingly more often than not) and by the end of the three days have them fluent in the OAIS concepts both through listening and through application to their own environments.  Our feedback from the course has proven that this is a job well done….DPTP abú!

As regular readers will know, we have been working with repositories for quite a few years now. In 2005 we began working with the School of Advanced Study on their requirements for an Institutional Repository, and since then we have installed, configured and maintained several repositories, including some highly customised, specialist systems.

In most cases we have used EPrints. This is partly because we are familiar with the stuff it is built with (Perl, MySQL and XML have been at the heart of the NDAD dataset repository we have operated for The National Archives since 1997). But also because we like the ever-expanding set of features and options EPrints provides. I’ve watched its capabilities grow, thanks to the seemingly limitless energy and initiative of the EPrints team at Southampton. (For an interesting, user’s-eye perspective on the relative merits of DSpace and EPrints, I recommend reading some of the posts tagged DSpace in Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector blog).

It’s three years almost to the day since Rory and I attended the pre-launch briefing on EPrints3 and came away convinced that, with its AJAX UI and evolving plugin architecture, EPrints 3 was likely to play a big part in our future plans.

And hardly a day’s gone by since, when we haven’t had some EPrints-related work on our plate. In 2007 we began developing Linnean Online for the Linnean Society, and PRIMO for the Institute of Musical Research. Out of this, and the snowballing Web 2.0 zeitgeist, we also honed the idea that became SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints), one of the first JISC Rapid Innovation projects. Most recently, we’ve scaled new heights of EPrints customisation with the SOAS Fürer-Haimendorf collection, with its user-defined albums and searching enhancements, all wrapped up in 9Web’s impressive graphic design.

We’ve tweaked config files and hacked templates and for the most part enjoyed doing stuff with EPrints. (All credit is due to Rory and Ben, by the way. My role is chiefly to say “We could make it do that couldn’t we?” And, lo and behold, usually “we” can.)

Over the years I’ve also talked to many repository managers, and potential repository managers, about their requirements and expectations. I’ve spoken and networked at DSpace User Groups , Open Repositories conferences and many excellent events organised by the JISC, particularly the Repositories Support Project – and I’ve met a lot of smart and insightful people in the repo biz. Some of it must have rubbed off – I think my own understanding of what’s needed, and what’s feasible has grown considerably.

But what we’ve never done is run our own repository, and experienced these things day-to-day for ourselves. As Atticus Finch said in To Kill A Mockingbird,

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

That’s why, in the gaps between everything else going on round here, Annemarie has been putting together the ULCC Publications Archive, which I hope will become a canonical home for our published outputs. It’s not big and it’s not clever, it’s certainly not perfect, but it is something we can use to improve our understanding of what it means to run a repository. We will also no doubt use it to explore some of the tools and techniques emanating from the EPrints developer community.

And now I can really start to empathise with the repository managers I know: their agony – clarifying copyright and licenses, ambiguous form fields, disappearing diacritics – and their ecstasy – a well-formed subject tree or citation, a successful search. I’ve also an insight into the needs of authors/submitters, since several articles are mine – and I naturally want to get the citations looking just right, so that I can embed some of the nice feeds EPrints provides into my blogs, e-portfolios and who knows what other mashups. Self-interest is a great motivator, as many Open Access advocates have observed: before long I’m sure I’ll be wanting download statistics, author profiles, and most of the other things I described in 1001 Things To Do With A Live Repository.

For me it’s an invaluable experience – no less so than when, a couple of years ago, I became an actual user of a VLE, through my MSc course at Edinburgh. There’s a world of difference between being a developer or implementer of this kind of online system – thinking your job’s done when it seems to be up-and-running – and being the poor end-user who doesn’t care about PHP, JSP, Maven, Apache, etc, but  just wants to get something done.

Among the things you’ll find in pubs.ulcc.ac.uk are: papers and articles from events we have contributed to over the years, such as iPRES, Open Repositories, and DLM-Forum; published reports, like last year’s JISC-PoWR web preservation report; presentations and posters from other events, mostly in the field of e-learning or digital archives; and even the swish product sheets produced by our ace marketing department, Tim and Frank!

As well as our most recent UK activities, we’ve also unearthed some other curios, such as Patricia’s article for the Catalan Archivists’ Forum, in Catalan, and a piece by Kevin in La Vanguardia, in Spanish. Also of interest is a brief account of ULCC’s first 30 years, in the form of a brochure for a small exhibition that was held at Senate House Library in 1999.

No doubt as we delve through our own digital archives we’ll find more goodies. Having a repository is an excellent opportunity to locate and appraise these things, and share those that seem interesting and informative enough. No less than this blog, and our E-learning colleagues’ El Blog, it should be an attractive and effective shop-window – just like any good Institutional Repository.

We’ve had to lose a lot of material relating to past computing technologies that is now of limited or no value to us – stuff we were keeping really just because we had the space. That includes extensive documentation on IBM and CDC systems of the past, as well as DEC systems and a huge variety of micros. We’ve kept a few gems (the reference card for the SNUFF editor is a particular personal favourite) and discovered a few as well. They include what’s probably the earliest evidence of ULCC’s web presence in 1994. I’ll be writing about that soon over on the JISC-PoWR blog.

The JISC funded SNEEP project (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints) – part of the original JISC rapid innovation programme – aimed to provide a set of social networking tools for EPrints repositories. It ran for 6 months and ended in May 2008. Since the rather low key publication of the resultant EPrints plugin interest and uptake has been slowly but surely gathering momentum.

Today I am pleased to announce a couple of significant SNEEP related developments. Firstly , thanks to my colleague Ben Wheeler here at ULCC, SNEEP 0.3.2 released this week offers an automagic installer. This does away with the (slightly tortuous) manual install procedure that we suspect discouraged all but the hardier EPrints hac… I mean administrators.

You can download SNEEP 0.3.2 and/or read Ben’s post to the EP-tech mailling list. The download page is also a good place to see SNEEP in action.

PICT

I am also pleased to announce a new project (funded as part of the 2009 JISC rapid innovation programme) that aims to build on the SNEEP work to provide SNEEP-ish services to a broader range of web resources. The goal of the PICT project (Platform Independent Community Toolbox) is a lightweight javascript tool that can be deployed across an number of web resources (not just a repository) to encompass the web-based real estate of a given research community and provide that community with collaborative tools available at the on-line research coalface.

Effectively PICT will allow resource owners to offer

• tags
• comments
• notes
• other goodies

from their web page. The data gathered by these tools will be managed by a PICT server (probably run by a community-minded resource owner) and be available for cross referencing with other resources in a PICT community.

If all that is a bit difficult to picture, rest assured that demos will appear throughout the course of the project that should help to clear the murk.

As well as providing entertainment, it’s a useful historical document. Although it features punch cards, we can see from the penalty square on the left hand side that the ability to describe a punch card, even 25 years ago, marked you as old enough to be collecting your pension. (Possibly some exaggeration there, but on such observations history is constructed.) There’s a handy, if again just-so-slightly inaccurate, diagram of the London network from the days just before the emergence of JANET.

To bring this every-so-slightly on-topic, it should be noted that the most severe penalty in the game is reserved for those who failed to ensure that their datasets were properly archived – a sentiment which I wholeheartedly support! Seasonal greetings to our readers, and to Alan Knott, the author/artist of the game and my immediate predecessor at ULCC.

Without going into too much detail and re-living every single presentation, there clearly is a lot more to digital archiving than meets the eye. Five stages, three legs, “the two documents”, OAIS were the main methods and models discussed, all during the first day of the three day programme. Even though my head was spinning and I had trouble remembering my own name, thanks to the information overload, my interest was sparked.

The methods and models mentioned above can be used by any organisation to find out where they are in the greater scheme of things, so to speak. Cornell’s five stages help determine at which ‘knowledge’ stage of digital preservation an organisation is; the OAIS reference model and TDR (Trusted Digital Repositories) help analyse technological and organisational infrastructure respectively. Once these methods and approaches have been used to decide on the “right” approach to digital preservation we looked at the next step: preservation approaches and legal issues. Not surprisingly the latter could have been extended to a week-long workshop itself.Day 2 was filled with a good mix of case studies, presentations and workshops, which focused on the use and necessity of metadata in preservation, and a big group exercise putting the recently acquired knowledge to the test.

Despite the fact that I missed the last day, I personally found it a more than worthwhile and helpful workshop to attend. Patricia, Ed, Rory and Kevin did a great job “on stage”; as I’m sure did all the unnamed heroes in the background, organising and supporting this fantastic event.

The first vacancy is for an Archives Assistant here in the Digital Archives Department, supporting the activities of many of the internal and external preservation projects we are working on, including the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD), which we run for The National Archives, the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP), and web-archiving activities for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). For full details see the job description on the ULCC website.

The second vacancy is for a UNIX Systems Administrator in our Infrastructure Department, with experience of (among other things) Apache, Tomcat, Java, Oracle, MySQL and LDAP. We expect that the successful candidate’s responsibilities will include helping us with current and future heritage projects, such as systems for the British Library and the Linnean Society, as well as managing packages like DSpace and Eprints. For full details see the job description on the ULCC website.

If you are interested, or know anyone who might be, please pass this message on!