In this issue:
- What's On - Forthcoming events from June 2014 onwards
- What's New - New reports and initiatives
- What's What - Looking back to the future: what will 2014 tell us about the state of digital preservation? William Kilbride, DPC
- Who's Who - Sixty Second Interview with Chris Awre, University of Hull
- Who's Hiring - The Digital Preservation small ads
- Your View? - Comments and views from readers
What's New is a joint publication of the DPC and DCC
What's On
The DCC have a number of events coming up that may be of interest to you. For further details on any of these, please see our DCC events listings at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/. You can also browse through our DCC events calendar to see a more extensive list of both DCC and external events.
CODATA International Training Workshop in Big Data for Science, for Researchers from Emerging and Developing Countries
4-20 June 2014
http://codata.org/blog/2014/03/26/codata-international-training-workshop-in-big-data-for-science-for-researchers-from-emerging-and-developing-countries/
CODATA, in collaboration with CODATA-China is delighted to invite applications from young researchers, research leaders and managers of research institutes in countries with emerging and developing economies to participate in the CODATA International Training Workshop in Big Data for Science, Beijing, 4-20 June 2014. Participation for successful applicants will be financially supported, thanks to a grant from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Open Repositories 2014
9 - 13 June 2014
http://or2014.helsinki.fi/
The 9th International Conference on Open Repositories will be hosted by the University of Helsinki‘s twin libraries, Helsinki University Library and the National Library of Finland. The theme of this year's conference is 'Towards Repository Ecosystems' and the call for contributions to the programme is now open.
DataCite workshop
13 June 2014
http://dataciteworkshopglasgow.eventbrite.co.uk
The workshop is primarily aimed at organisations and institutions in Scotland (and the north of England!) who are currently working on their research data repositories and would like to find out more about working with DataCite. We will summarise the main themes of last year’s workshop series: explaining what DataCite is, what it does and how you can work with us in the UK to assign DataCite DOIs to your research data. We will also be joined by the University of Leeds who signed up to use DataCite at the end of 2013 and will be our case study for the day.
Visual Arts Data Skills for Researchers
16 June 2014
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/visual-arts-data-skills-for-researchers-workshop-epsom-tickets-11418630431?aff=eorg
This session will explore the nature of 'research data' in the creative arts, its importance, and the basic principles and reasons for data curation and preservation. It will also introduce participants to the creation of a research data management plan and the essential requirements of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Technical Summary and Plan.
Technology Bytes: Tools and Services for Digital Preservation in Bite-Sized Chunks - Next in Series: Michele Kimpton from Duraspace (Members Only)
18 June
http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/76-procuring-preservation-vendor-webinar-series?xref=88%3AKeep
Following the success of our hugely popular event 'Procuring Preservation: Writing and Understanding Requirements in Digital Preservation' in December 2013, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is pleased to invite members to a series of webinars where vendors and tool developers will present the tools they currently support and their plans for the future. Individually, each webinar will privilege members with a deep dive into the latest tools and an insight into technology trends. They will help members assess the strengths of products available, how these might be best applied to digital preservation in practice, as well as providing a platform for members to cross-question developers. Collectively the series will ensure that DPC members have a comprehensive catalogue of the digital preservation market place, shortening the routes to procurement of digital preservation services and matching product development to their needs.
RDMF11: Workflows and Lifecycle Models for Data Management
20 June 2014
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/research-data-management-forum-rdmf/rdmf11
This one-day event will provide an opportunity to hear from experts in different stages of the scholarly research, publication and long-term data management lifecycle, as well as a forum for more detailed discussion of specific areas of interest to the event’s participants. It will appeal to a broad audience, spanning researchers; staff from library, information and research organisations; repository managers and administrators; data curators, data centre managers and other data professionals; funding organisations and research networks.
Making metadata work
23 June 2014
http://www.iskouk.org/events/metadata_June_2014.htm#introduction
This event will be a showcase for the latest developments in the evolution of the Semantic Web, exploitation of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), metadata annotation to aid workflow automation, information retrieval in networks of diverse media assets, Linked Data, and other opportunities for using metadata.
PrestoCentre Preservathon “AV Preservation Storage Solutions”
25-26 June 2014
https://www.prestocentre.org/events/preservathon/storage-2014
PrestoCentre Preservathons are two-day hands-on events developed around main themes and challenges in audiovisual digitisation, preservation and long-term access. During the first day, attendees will work together in small groups. Activities include workshops, roleplaying, demonstrations, presentations, writing and negotiation exercises (e.g. call for tender, SLA). Each Preservathon includes a competitive element. The second day is organised as a mini-conference including concise presentations and demonstrations of the results and experiences from the first day, a ceremony to award the winning group, and a short but informative review on the subject, including the state of relevant technology, related research, and open questions.
Digital Preservation Advanced Practitioner Course 2014
7-11 July 2014
http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/index.php/training/aparsen-training-schedule/advanced-practitioner-course-2014/
This week-long event in Vienna, will bring together practitioners and researchers at the leading edge of digital preservation, providing attendees with training at an advanced level. The training will aim to cover issues across the digital preservation lifecycle by addressing topics within four main themes: identifying the key issues of digital preservation, understanding the value of digital data, managing and preserving your data and establishing trustworthy repositories. The training will be presented as a mix of presentations, practical exercises and group discussion.
Save the Date!
DPC Briefing Day on Virtualisation and Digital Preservation
22 July 2014
http://www.dpconline.org/events
ICPSR Summer Program: Curating and Managing Research Data for Re-use
July 28-August 1, 2014
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/sumprog/courses/0149
This five-day workshop is for individuals interested or actively engaged in the curation and management of research data, in view of data sharing and reuse, particularly data librarians, data archivists, data producers and stewards with responsibilities for data management.
Save the date!
DPC and 4C ‘Investing in Opportunity: Policy Practice and Planning for a Sustainable Digital Future’ Conference
17- 18 November 2014
http://www.dpconline.org/events
Working jointly with the membership of the DPC, the EC funded conference will compare the strategic economic aspirations of funders and policy makers against the practical experience of digital preservation, including perspectives from practitioners, vendors and users of digit preservation services. It will identify emerging best practice and will provide a forum for needs and practical requirements to be articulated. The conference also coincides with the hotly anticipated ceremony for the presentation of the 2014 Digital Preservation Awards.
What's New
For more information on any of the items below, please visit the DCC website at http://www.dcc.ac.uk.
Digital Preservation Awards 2014 – nominations open
http://www.dpconline.org/advocacy/awards/digital-preservation-awards-2014
Created in 2004 to raise awareness about digital preservation, the Digital Preservation Awards are the most prominent celebration of achievement for those people and organisations that have made significant and innovative contributions to ensuring our digital memory is accessible tomorrow.
Comments Welcome: New Edition of the Digital Preservation Handbook
http://www.dpconline.org/newsroom/latest-news/1226-comments-welcome-new-edition-of-the-digital-preservation-handbook
The DPC, with the assistance of Charles beagrie Ltd is scoping and planning for a new edition of the online Digital Preservation Handbook and would be very grateful if you could contribute your needs and views to this work. There are a maximum of 13 questions in total and the survey should take around 10 minutes of your time to complete. The online questionnaire is accessible at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DPHandbook and the survey will close on Wednesday 16th June.
More universities to benefit from lower cost, high-quality data archiving
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/more-universities-to-benefit-from-lower-cost-high-quality-data-archiving-07-may-2014
Jisc announces that five of its member universities have purchased the Arkivum data archiving service via the Janet Data Archive Framework Agreement.
Jisc and ProQuest enable access to essential digital content
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/jisc-and-proquest-enable-access-to-essential-digital-content-
A new agreement for a national license between Jisc and ProQuest will enable access for the UK higher education community to two major digital archives: Early European Books Collections 1-4 and The Vogue Archive.
Major international associations join together to underscore their support for immediate open access to research articles
https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/advocacy-leadership/aligning-repository-networks-across-regions/statement-about-embargo-periods/
A number of international initiatives have endorsed policies and practices that enable Open Access – immediate, barrier free access to and reuse of scholarly articles.
University of Cambridge OA guidance
https://www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk/changing
The University of Cambridge has released a useful guide for their researchers to comply with HEFCE/REF OA policies.
TIMBUS newsletter
http://timbusproject.net/resources/blogs-news-items-etc/timbusnewsletter/timbusnewsletter32/260-timbusnewsletter32
Issue 3.2 (May 2014) is now available to download or read on the TIMBUS website.
CODATA Prize 2014
http://codata.org/blog/2014/05/26/codata-prize-2014-call-for-nominations-for-outstanding-achievement-in-the-world-of-scientific-and-technical-data/
The CODATA Prize is a major biennial award which acknowledges outstanding achievement in the world of scientific and technical data; is given in recognition either of a one time achievement or of an achievement over time; is given, in preference, to an individual; and recognises work carried out in fields of importance to scientific and technical data, such as data management, evaluation, dissemination, access issues, international cooperation, knowledge discovery, archiving or related subjects. The deadline for nominations is 20 July 2014.
What's What - Looking back to the future: what will 2014 tell us about the state of digital preservation?
William Kilbride, Executive Director, Digital Preservation Coalition
In case you hadn't noticed, the Digital Preservation Awards are coming back in 2014. It's a big undertaking for a small organisation like the DPC and we are very grateful to the many supporters and colleagues who help to make it a success. This will be the tenth anniversary of the first awards so it's a good point to look back at previous winners and consider their impact.
The first Digital Preservation Award was presented in 2004 under the tutelage of the Conservation Awards. The National Archives was the winner for the 'first ever digital archive of electronic government documents'. Although revolutionary in its time, there are two features of this project which seem surprising in retrospect. Firstly, the project described itself as a response to the massive increase in the use and production of digital documents in government. While true, ten years later it's probably truer than ever that archivists and records managers face significant and growing volumes of digital records pouring out of government. This probably explains a second striking feature of the project: that the process of building has been pretty much continuous since then. The National Archive's 'Digital Archive' is now a 'Digital Repository', part of a 'Digital Records Infrastructure', representing a significant increase in capacity and in capability since 2004.
In 2004 the judges set a useful precedent of giving a special commendation to the CAMiLEON project. Although it may not have had the same ongoing urgency of the National Archives’ Digital Archive Project, it has certainly filled more column inches. Arguably the effort to recover and replay the BBC's Domesday Disk makes it the only digital preservation project so far to have seeped into the public consciousness, aided in part by the recognition of the judges.
The second award came round in 2005, still under the guidance of the Conservation Awards. This time the award was presented to the PREMIS Working Group for their data dictionary which had only just been published. PREMIS is probably the most cerebral of the winners so far and certainly presented a challenge to the press officer at the time. But their work is fundamental: it's impossible to imagine a world where we didn't understand digital preservation as fundamentally a metadata question; and difficult to imagine how tools and services could really grow to maturity without a shared understanding of how to document our collections. One might even say that without PREMIS (or something like it) there could not be any future winners.
The third award was presented in 2007, the first year that I was directly involved as a judge. Again the award found its way to Kew, this time for the DROID file format signature tool. DROID moved the awards from concepts and demonstrations to practical applications that were universally applicable and which were designed to work at scale. The proliferation of file formats and the threat of format obsolescence were significant concerns in the early years of digital preservation. While these fears have tended to subside - there are very few file formats which cannot be 'cracked' - the need for characterisation services remains as great. Massive increases in data mean that characterisation is vital in order to target limited resources, while heightened awareness of cybersecurity means we need ever greater re-assurance that our archives do not create unexpected vulnerabilities.
When the awards returned in 2010, I found myself not simply a judge but responsible for the whole thing. Another bumper set of applications eventually saw the award being shared between Los Alamos National Lab and Old Dominion University for their work on Memento. Billed as 'Time-travel for the web', Memento connects web-browsers with web archives by offering a 'time-gate'. In essence this plug in for any web-browser means that any user can select the date (and time) of any web page they want to browse. Using a component already embedded within the HTTP protocol, Memento searches across discrete web archives and furnishes users with the archive that conforms best to their request. This is revolutionary in two senses. Firstly it connects users directly with web archives without having to make a special effort to access archived documents: the live web and the archived web are united. But the technology is not the point: Memento unlocks in a particular way the value of web archives.
2012 was the 10th anniversary of the DPC so we set ourselves a more ambitious programme of awards. Organising the whole programme ourselves for the first time we offered awards in three categories: Research and Innovation, Teaching and Communications, and a special Decennial Award for the most outstanding work in the decade of the DPC's existence. The shortlist was announced at a special reception in the House of Lords and the winners were revealed at a reception in December.
The PLANETS Project, represented by the Open Planets Foundation and partners won the award for Research and Innovation not just for the tools and services which they produced but also for the impact which they have had in galvanising the international developer community around core technical and practical challenges in digital preservation. The University of London Computing Centre won the award for Teaching and Communication for the long-running Digital Preservation Training Programme, a popular programme that many DPC members have benefited from directly.
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) won the Decennial Award for an outstanding contribution to digital preservation over the previous decade. ADS has a tremendous reputation among those in the know for low-key, practical problem-solving. The service they offer is undoubtedly specialist in terms of its subject matter but digital preservation specialists readily identify with the skills necessary to document, manage and distribute the large number and wide range of sometimes exotic data sets that they preserve. If it's fair to say that ADS doesn't feature very prominently in the digital preservation literature: it's because they have been avid readers and astute judges of what works. The data they protect is unique and often irreplaceable and their business model, mixing commercial and research funds, has been robust through adversity. It's this strength across different categories which made them a worthy winner. They are also a significant witness about how digital preservation has progressed in the decade since the DPC was set up.
In 2014 will be someone else's turn to shine. OPF is sponsoring the Award for Research and Innovation this year while our partners in NCDD are sponsoring the award for Teaching and Communications. Three new awards have been created this year: a student award, an award for practical preservation, and an award for Digital Preservation in Industry. The nominations are now open and the deadline is 28th July. DPC runs these awards for the whole digital preservation community. So we’re asking the whole community to help us find and celebrate outstanding work.
I wonder what this year’s winners tell us about the state of digital preservation.
Who's Who - Chris Awre, University of Hull
Where do you work and what's your job title?
The University of Hull. I am Head of Information Management, a Group that encompasses all regular library acquisitions, cataloguing, access management, library systems and digital repository.
Tell us a bit about your organisation
The University of Hull is the UK's 7th oldest university, founded in 1927 (receiving its charter in 1952), offering degree courses to 22,000 students within five Faculties: Arts and Social Sciences, Business, Education, Health and Social Care, Science and Engineering, and the Hull York Medical School. Library and Learning Innovation oversees library and archival provision, the latter being delivered primarily through the Hull History Centre, a collaborative initiative with Hull City Council.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
- The development of the digital repository, Hydra, to manage and process image collections
- The implementation of a Blacklight catalogue for the Hull History Centre
- The exploration of Hydra for the management of born-digital archives
- The replacement of the University's library management system
How did you end up in digital preservation?
Through the development of the digital repository in the Jisc REMAP project, where we sought to ensure that materials captured could be properly preserved, and highlighting the importance of starting preservation from the point of creation.
What are the challenges of digital preservation for an organisation such as yours?
Getting the necessary resourcing to develop and implement digital preservation processes as a priority over other services.
What sort of partnerships would you like to develop?
Partnerships with other University repository and archive staff to explore collaborative ways of implementing digital preservation systems.
If we could invent one tool or service that would help you, what would it be?
The service of identifying those willing and able to contribute towards technical work pulling other tools together and linking them to repositories
And if you could give people one piece of advice about digital preservation ....?
Start with guidance on how files are best created, to facilitate future preservation.
If you could save for perpetuity just one digital file, what would it be?
A list & analysis of all the other digital files you destroyed OR the XML document from our Fedora repository that holds the details of all the files within the archive.
Finally, where can we contact you or find out about your work?
University of Hull - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Writings on the work carried out can be found at https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_field=all_fields&q=hydra
Who's Hiring: The Digital Preservation Small Ads
United Nations: Digital Archivist
(The Hague, Full-Time, Temporary (3 months in the first instance), Salary: not disclosed, Closing Date: 4 June 2014)
http://www.unmict.org/files/recruitment/140521_da_p3.pdf
HATII, University of Glasgow: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer
(Glasgow, Full-Time, Permanent, Salary: £47314-53233, Closing Date: 8 June 2014)
http://www.gla.ac.uk/about/jobs/vacancies/ reference: A60098
Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University: Trainee Digital Archivist
(Oxford, Full-Time, Fixed-term for 2 years, Salary: £15,814, Closing Date: 9 June 2014)
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about-us/jobs#vacancy-113121
Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University: DAMS Software Engineer (2 posts)
(Oxford, Full-Time, Fixed-term for 1 year, Salary: £29,837 - £36,661 p.a., Closing Date: 16 June 2014)
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about-us/jobs#vacancy-113339
Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University: Digital Engineer
(Oxford, Full-Time, Fixed-term for 1 year, Salary: £29,837 - £36,661 p.a., Closing Date: 16 June 2014)
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about-us/jobs#vacancy-113341
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