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!

1. Consider your organisational requirements, drivers and level at which you want to do it, and create a selection policy that matches this. Consider legal framework.
2. Understand the technology that copies websites (harvesters) and how websites themselves behave. I talked about aspects of the dynamic web that sometimes trip up a harvester – CMS, wiki, databases.
3. Consider how (and indeed whether) you want to offer access to the collection, and whether metadata is needed.
4. Build a programme for web archiving, adapting existing methodologies as needed – e.g. Institutional vs Individual. What other services exist, and can they do it for you?

In the middle, we had an excellent case study from Dave Thompson at the Wellcome Trust, and his experiences strongly reflected many of the themes of the course. Like many organisations, they don’t have one single reason for collecting web archives, and the future value of these collections is something we can’t yet see (due to its closeness with the live web).

We were all impressed by the people attending the course, all from a variety of backgrounds and projects, coming with widely different expectations of how they would be managing their web content. National libraries and business archives were represented, but also the arts; the Tate Gallery are doing interesting work in time-based media and specialist works of art that manifest themselves over the web. How to capture that content, and make it perform in the future?

The DPTP recognises the value of participation and sharing experiences, which we can all learn from. When I was holding forth on the concept of three possible points of capture for web content, I was very pleased to hear a proposal for a fourth possible method from our Swiss delegate Daniel Spichty. There were also numerous questions about exactly what it is that Content Management Systems do, which suggested to me I need to learn more about the inner workings and preservation implications of such systems.

I’m also pleased we were able to offer a printed copy of the PoWR Handbook to all those attending – in advance of the official launch of the book, which will take place at IWMW 2010 on 12 July.

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.

In the Handbook we’ve tried to cover a huge, and sometimes controversial, area in as accessible a way as possible. The workshops, attended by both web-management and records-management professionals from HE institutions, brought  a wide range of concerns and issues to light. It’s been quite a job fitting it all in.

Even as the project progressed, we became aware of new developments in thinking about how to approach the special issues of managing web resources, including everybody’s favourite new fast automatic Web 2.0 applications. We saw the publication of Steve Bailey’s Records Management 2.0 book, TNA’s Web Continuity project, and further web archiving developments at UKWAC. We’ve even heard it whispered in some quarters that approaches to preservation may need a more profound reassessment in the context of the Web and the Cloud. Many of these issues were recorded on the PoWR blog, and we tried to reflect as much of this in the Handbook as possible.

Another recent JISC publication, The Digital Preservation Policies Study by Charles Beagrie Ltd, published at the same time, is complementary in many ways, and reassured us that many of the conclusions we groped towards in the Handbook were not so wide of the mark! Like PoWR, the  Digital Preservation Policies Study identified the necessity of high-level policy engagement as the sine qua non of effective digital preservation.

Digital preservation solutions are undoubtedly partly technical, and the tools being created will enhance digital longevity, but these solutions are also equally dependent on organisational issues. It is important to remember that digital preservation relies on the interaction between the digital preservation environment and wider organisational objectives and procedural issues. These could be financial and staffing issues, collection management, legal obligations, auditing requirements, and other strategies and policies. In this respect, recognition by organisational divisions that digital data is important and key to the successful running of an organisation is crucial.

The Digital Preservation Policies Study, p.11

Among the other recommendations the Study shares with PoWR include:

• Analysis of existing policies and strategies, and how our work can support them even if said polices don’t explicitly refer to preservation or digital assets
• Taking a phased approach – nothing happens all at once. (PoWR recommends pilot projects and working with supportive departments.)
• Careful scoping of preservation requirements. (With regard to web resources, PoWR suggests not everything, not every version, and not forever.)
• Identifying if and where existing systems will do the job
• Consideration of lifecycle, publication, and retention schedules.

The Charles Beagrie survey is a very concise and accessible contribution to the field, and we hope the PoWR Handbook, with its specific focus on established and emerging Web issues, and attention to the detailed and everyday concerns of our many contributors and correspondents, will be similarly useful. We also hope that the work of PoWR will continue in some form, on the blog and perhaps in the form of new projects and workshops, to fill in the gaps we left, and deal with the constantly emerging Web developments. Anyone for PoWR 2.0?

As Richard noted in Part I, digital preservation is a “series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary.” But what sort of digital materials might be in scope for the PoWR project?

We think it extremely likely that institutional web resources are going to include digital materials such as “records created during the day-to-day business of an organisation” and “born-digital materials created for a specific purpose”.

What we want is to “maintain access to these digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological change”. This leads us to consider the longevity of certain file formats, the changes undergone by proprietary software, technological obsolescence, and the migration or emulation strategies we’ll use to overcome these problems.

By migration we mean “a means of overcoming technological obsolescence by transferring digital resources from one hardware/software generation to the next.” In contrast, emulation is “a means of overcoming technological obsolescence of hardware and software by developing techniques for imitating obsolete systems on future generations of computers.”

Note also that when we talk about preserving anything, “for as long as necessary” doesn’t always mean “forever”. For the purposes of the PoWR project, it may be worth us considering medium-term preservation for example, which allows “continued access to digital materials beyond changes in technology for a defined period of time, but not indefinitely.”

We also hope to consider the idea of life-cycle management. According to DPC, “The major implications for life-cycle management of digital resources is the need actively to manage the resource at each stage of its life-cycle and to recognise the inter-dependencies between each stage and commence preservation activities as early as practicable.”

From these definitions alone, it should be apparent that success in the preservation of web resources will potentially involve the participation and co-operation of a wide range of experts: information managers, asset managers, webmasters, IT specialists, system administrators, records managers, and archivists.

(All the quotations and definitions above are taken from the DPC’s online handbook.)