"Joining in the Enterprise of Response in the Wake of the NSF Data Management Planning Requirement"

Patricia Hswe and Ann Holt have published "Joining in the Enterprise of Response in the Wake of the NSF Data Management Planning Requirement" in the latest issue of Research Library Issues.

Here's an excerpt:

This article affords an overview of the new, leading roles libraries can adopt in the provision of data services, thus blending appraisal with advocacy. How are libraries currently giving assistance in data management planning? What recommendations can libraries make that draw from, and build on, these efforts? The article also reports on new communities of practice forming around the challenges of digital data issues, bringing together much needed knowledge and expertise not only from libraries but also from various other sectors of a university, including IT divisions, grant administration offices, and research institutes.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation

Association of Research Libraries has released New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Authored by Tyler Walters and Katherine Skinner, the report looks at how libraries are developing new roles and services in the arena of digital curation for preservation. The authors consider a "promising set of new roles that libraries are currently carving out in the digital arena," describing emerging strategies for libraries and librarians and highlighting collaborative approaches through a series of case studies of key programs and projects. They also provide helpful definitions and offer recommendations for libraries considering how best to make or expand their investments in digital curation. Issues and developments within and across the sciences and humanities are considered.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Preserving Our Digital Heritage: The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 2010 Report

The Library of Congress has released Preserving Our Digital Heritage: The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program 2010 Report.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

It documents the achievements of the Library of Congress and its NDIIPP partners working together to create sustainable long-term access to digital materials.

Since NDIIPP was founded in 2000 by an act of Congress, a network of over 185 partners in 44 states and 25 countries have developed a distributed technical infrastructure, preserved over 1400 at-risk collections, and have made strides to support a legal environment conducive to digital preservation.

The report describes a decade of action in digital preservation and outlays the short- and long-term plans to ensure libraries, archives and other heritage institutions in the United States can collect and provide long-term access to the resources of the 21st Century, and beyond.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Publishing Support for Small Print-Based Publishers: Options for ARL Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries has released Publishing Support for Small Print-Based Publishers: Options for ARL Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This report is the summary of a project funded by ARL to investigate how research libraries might provide support to print-only publishers in order to ensure long-term digital access to their content. The final report was prepared for ARL by project consultants, October Ivins and Judy Luther.

The project was conducted from 2009 to 2010, and the report to ARL includes identification of the extent and character of journal titles for which support would be necessary, reviews of the capabilities and interest of research library publishing services to support the publishers, and recommendations for actions ARL and member libraries might undertake to address the needs of the editors and publishers of these small print-only titles. Appendices provide talking points for campus outreach, an annotated bibliography, and an overview of the landscape for publishing options.

For more information on the project, please visit http://www.arl.org/sc/models/lib-publishing/pub-support/index.shtml.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010

Digital Scolarship has released the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010. This 80-page book presents over 500 English-language articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. This selective bibliography covers digital curation and preservation copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., data, media, and e-journals), metadata, models and policies, national and international efforts, projects and institutional implementations, research studies, services, strategies, and digital repository concerns. Most sources have been published from 2000 through 2010; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.

The Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 is available as an open access PDF file and as a $9.95 paperback. All versions of the bibliography are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

For further information about Digital Scholarship publications, see the "Digital Scholarship Publications Overview" and "Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications."

 Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 cover

"Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability"

Sarah Rhodes has published "Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive's Examination of URL Stability" in LLRX.com.

Here's an excerpt:

In analyzing a single sample of these original URLs at annual intervals, the prevalence of link rot was 8.3% in 2008, within zero to twelve months of the content being harvested. One year later, twelve to twenty-four months after the content was harvested, link rot in the same sample was found to have jumped to 14.3%. In the most recent analysis, in 2010, link rot was found to be 27.9%. In other words, link rot increased from about one in every twelve archived titles in 2008, to one in every seven titles in 2009, and finally to about one in every 3.5 titles in 2010.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

NEH Issues Call for Proposals for Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities's Division of Preservation and Access has issued a call for proposals for Preservation and Access Research and Development grants. Application deadline: May 19, 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Eligible projects include:

  • the development of technical standards, best practices, and tools for preserving and creating access to humanities collections;
  • the exploration of more effective scientific and technical methods of preserving humanities collections;
  • the development of automated procedures and computational tools to integrate, analyze, and repurpose humanities data in disparate online resources; and
  • the investigation and testing of new ways of providing digital access to humanities materials that are not easily digitized using current methods.

NEH especially encourages applications that address the following topics:

  • Digital Preservation: how to preserve digital humanities materials, including born-digital materials, for which there is no analog counterpart;
  • Recorded Sound and Moving Image Collections: how to preserve and increase access to the record of the twentieth century contained in these formats; and
  • Preventive Conservation: how to protect humanities collections and slow their deterioration through the use of sustainable preservation strategies.. . .

The maximum award is $350,000 for up to three years. Applicants whose projects focus on any of the three areas of special interest noted above may request up to $400,000.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Lasting Change: Sustaining Digital Scholarship and Culture in Canada

The Sustaining Digital Scholarship for Sustainable Culture Group has released Lasting Change: Sustaining Digital Scholarship and Culture in Canada.

Here's an excerpt:

This report reflects the growing concern in the scholarly and cultural communities, and beyond, regarding the sustainability of Canada's digital knowledge and heritage. Canada's digital advantage is only of value if it can be carried into the future. Canadians must meet the challenge of preserving and enhancing scholarly and artistic knowledge production and our culture in a digital environment. This report reviews the current state of knowledge about the sustainability of digital scholarship and related cultural activity in Canada and identifies research opportunities that emerge from consideration of the literature.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Randy S. Kiefer Named as Executive Director of CLOCKSS

Randy S. Kiefer has been named as the Executive Director of the CLOCKSS Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The CLOCKSS Archive (http://www.clockss.org) is pleased to announce the appointment of Randy S. Kiefer as their new Executive Director. Randy is the Principal Consultant in the Kiefer Strategy Group, LLC, which handles business development efforts for publishers like INFORMS, the American Accounting Association, the Military Operations Research Society, and others. From 1999 to May of 2010, Randy served in various roles at INFORMS. For his last three years, he was the Director of Subscription, Membership, and Technical Services at INFORMS, and his primary activity was developing the global library market for INFORMS' twelve journals.

Randy is a board member of COIN-OR (http://www.coin-or.org) , an organization dedicated to open-source software for the operations research community. and is on the board of two charitable organizations in the Baltimore area. Randy has been active in software development since 1985. . . .

Gordon Tibbitts, outgoing CLOCKSS executive director and President Atypon Systems declares, "The CLOCKSS Archive, now one year old is well placed for its next phase of growth. The Board of Directors is very pleased to have Randy on board as the Archive's first full time Executive Director."

CLOCKSS is a global nonprofit, community-governed archive that preserves digital scholarly materials for the very long term through a geo-physical and geo-political distributed network of archive nodes.

| Digital Scholarship |

"Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) Training Needs Assessment Survey: Executive Summary"

The Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative has released the "Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) Training Needs Assessment Survey: Executive Summary."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement :

The survey was conducted in summer and fall 2010 by the Library’s Digital Preservation Outreach and Education initiative which seeks to foster outreach, education and collaboration nationwide to encourage organizations to preserve their digital content, regardless of staff or budget size or location.

The survey received 868 responses. Of the respondents, 40% were libraries, 34% were archives and 16% were museums. The rest consisted of state and local governments, corporations, nonprofit organizations, parks, and churches.

Among the survey’s major findings:

  • Just over half of the organizations who responded to the survey have less than 25 employees.
  • Only about one-third of respondents had full-time or part-time paid staff dedicated to digital preservation duties. One-half of respondents assigned digital preservation to various staff on an as-needed basis, one-fifth had no staff for this function, and one-tenth used volunteers (figures have been rounded off).
  • Among potential subject areas for digital preservation training, the most important area to respondents was technical training. Management planning, project management and strategic training all tied for second place.
  • The most preferred format for receiving training was small, in-person workshops. Proximity was significant—onsite training was the first choice, with training within a 100-mile radius the second choice.
  • A half-day to a full day was the most preferred length for training.
  • Digital content holdings for almost 95 percent of respondents consisted entirely of digitized versions of already-held collections (typically, paper-based materials), and about 5 percent of holdings were "born digital" content.

Some general observations can be gleaned from the survey. Most organizations only work on digital preservation when it is needed; few devote a full-time staff member to such duties. Most are digitizing paper collections rather than preserving "born digital" data. Short sessions of practical training are most needed; training should be provided on-site because most respondents are small organizations with limited training budgets.

| Digital Scholarship |

"Data Preservation in High Energy Physics"

David M. South has self-archived "Data Preservation in High Energy Physics" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are in many cases unique. At the same time, HEP has no coherent strategy for data preservation and re-use, and many important and complex data sets are simply lost. In a period of a few years, several important and unique experimental programs will come to an end, including those at HERA, the b-factories and at the Tevatron. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis (DPHEP) was formed and a series of workshops were held to investigate this issue in a systematic way. The physics case for data preservation and the preservation models established by the group are presented, as well as a description of the transverse global projects and strategies already in place.

| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography, Version 2

Version 2 of the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works. This selective bibliography includes over 500 articles, books, and technical reports that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Table of Contents

1 General Works about Digital Curation and Preservation
2 Digital Preservation Copyright Issues
3 Digital Preservation of Formats and Materials
3.1 General Works
3.2 Digital Data
3.3 Digital Media
3.4 E-journals
3.5 Other Digital Formats and Materials
3.6 World-Wide Web
4 Digital Preservation Metadata
5 Digital Preservation Models and Policies
6 Digital Preservation National and International Efforts
7 Digital Preservation Projects and Institutional Implementations
8 Digital Preservation Research
9 Digital Preservation Services
9.1 JSTOR
9.2 LOCKSS
9.3 Portico
10 Digital Preservation Strategies
11 Digital Repository Digital Preservation Issues
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author

The following recent Digital Scholarship publications may also be of interest:

See also: Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications.

| Digital Scholarship |

Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment

OCLC has released Cloud-Sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-Digitized Library Environment.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The objective of the project was to examine the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories. The study assessed the opportunity for library space saving and cost avoidance through the systematic and intentional outsourcing of local management operations for digitized books to shared service providers and progressive downsizing of local print collections in favor of negotiated access to the digitized corpus and regionally consolidated print inventory.

Some of the findings from the project that are detailed in the report include:

  • There is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations.
  • The combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the US Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers.
  • Substantial library space savings and cost avoidance could be achieved if academic institutions outsourced management of redundant low-use inventory to shared service providers.
  • Academic library directors can have a positive and profound impact on the future of academic print collections by adopting and implementing a deliberate strategy to build and sustain regional print service centers that can reduce the total cost of library preservation and access.

| Digital Scholarship |

Digital Preservation: Major PRONOM Update

The US National Archives has announced that PRONOM has been significantly updated.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The National Archives has contributed to the update of a groundbreaking system—made available online today—that supports long-term preservation of and access to electronic records. The "new and improved" version of this "PRONOM" system was developed in partnership with the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

PRONOM is a web-based public technical registry of more than 750 different digital file formats that enables digital archivists, records managers and the public to precisely identify and confirm digital file formats. This identification is the first step to ensuring long-term electronic file preservation by enabling the identification of those file formats that are in danger of becoming obsolete. . . .

Technology from the National Archives contributed to a 25% increase in the number of entries in the PRONOM database, greatly enhancing PRONOM's range. "The National Archives is proud to share these technologies and contribute to PRONOM. Providing sustained access to valuable digital information is essential to preserving both our nation's records, and valuable digital assets worldwide" said NCAST Director, Kenneth Thibodeau. "The electronic records of the U.S. Government must be preserved for future generations, just as traditional paper and parchment records were preserved for us."

| Digital Scholarship |

Memento Project Wins Digital Preservation Award 2010

The Memento Project has won the Digital Preservation Award 2010.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute for Conservation and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are delighted to announce that the Memento Project led by Herbert Van De Sompel and colleagues of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Michael Nelson and colleagues of Old Dominion University, USA, has won the Digital Preservation Award 2010. . . .

"The ability to change and update pages is one of the web’s greatest advantages but it introduces a sort of structured instability which makes it hard to depend on web pages in the long term. For more than a decade services like the UK Web Archive and the Internet Archive have provided a stable but partial memory of a fragment of the web—but users had no way of linking between current content and earlier versions held by web archives."

"The Memento project resolves this by letting users set a time preference in their browser. The underlying technology then deploys basic, under-used features of the HTTP protocol to direct users to whichever archived copy of a website most closely matches their request." [Richard Ovenden, Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition]

| Digital Scholarship |

"Selected Internet Resources on Digital Research Data Curation"

Brian Westra et al. have published "Selected Internet Resources on Digital Research Data Curation" in the latest issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to present a webliography of reasonable scope and length, the authors focused on resources applicable to the broader topic of digital research data curation as they relate to the natural sciences. Materials primarily or solely devoted to medical informatics, social sciences, and the humanities were not included. However, it should be noted that a number of the resources presented here are also applicable to research data curation in disciplines other than the sciences—for example, data repository software may be as useful to the social scientist as it is to a researcher in ecology. Additional scope specificity, when necessary, is provided in respective section listings below.

| Digital Scholarship |

Guide for Research Libraries: The NSF Data Sharing Policy

ARL has released the Guide for Research Libraries: The NSF Data Sharing Policy.

Here's an excerpt:

The Association for Research Libraries has developed this guide primarily for librarians, to help them make sense of the new NSF requirement. It provides the context for, and an explanation of, the policy change and its ramifications for the grant-writing process. It investigates the role of libraries in data management planning, offering guidance in helping researchers meet the NSF requirement. In addition, the guide provides a resources page, where examples of responses from ARL libraries may be found, as well as guides for data management planning created by various NSF directorates and approaches to the topic created by international data archive and curation centers.

| Digital Scholarship |

"Keeping Bits Safe: How Hard Can It Be?"

David S. H. Rosenthal has published "Keeping Bits Safe: How Hard Can It Be?" in ACM Queue.

Here's an excerpt:

There is an obvious question we should be asking: how many copies in storage systems with what reliability do we need to get a given probability that the data will be recovered when we need it? This may be an obvious question to ask, but it is a surprisingly hard question to answer. Let's look at the reasons why.

To be specific, let's suppose we need to keep a petabyte for a century and have a 50 percent chance that every bit will survive undamaged. This may sound like a lot of data and a long time, but there are already data collections bigger than a petabyte that are important to keep forever. The Internet Archive is already multiple petabytes.

E-Journal Archiving for UK HE Libraries: A Draft White Paper

JISC has released E-Journal Archiving for UK HE Libraries: A Draft White Paper for comment.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Libraries are facing increasing space pressures and funding constraints. There is a growing interest in wherever possible moving more rapidly to e-only provision to help alleviate these pressures as well as to provide new electronic services to users. One of the most cited barriers and concerns both from library and faculty staff to moving to e-only has been sustaining and assuring long-term access to electronic content.

The aim of this white paper is to help universities and libraries implement policies and procedures in relation to e-journal archiving which can help support the move towards e-only provision of scholarly journals across the HE sector. The white paper is also contributing to complementary work JISC and other funders are commissioning on moving towards e-only provision of Journals.

Preserving Virtual Worlds II Gets $785,898 IMLS Grant

The Preserving Virtual Worlds II project has been awarded a $785,898 National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Preserving Virtual Worlds II: Methods for Evaluating and Preserving Significant Properties of Educational Games and Complex Interactive Environments (PVW2) is led by GSLIS Assistant Professor Jerome McDonough in partnership with the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, and Stanford University. PVW2 plans to help improve the capacity of libraries, museums, and archives to preserve computer games, video games, and interactive fiction.

The original Preserving Virtual Worlds project, funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP), investigated what preservation issues arose with computer games and interactive fiction, and how existing metadata and packaging standards might be employed for the long-term preservation of these materials. PVW2 will focus on determining properties for a variety of educational games and game franchises in order to provide a set of best practices for preserving the materials through virtualization technologies and migration, as well as provide an analysis of how the preservation process is documented. PVW2 is a two-year project, to be conducted between October 2010 and September 2012.

Read more about it at "Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 Funded."

Report on Digital Preservation Practice and Plans amongst LIBER Members with Recommendations for Practical Action

EuropeanaTravel has released Report on Digital Preservation Practice and Plans amongst LIBER Members with Recommendations for Practical Action.

Here's an excerpt:

As part of Work package 1 concerned with planning digitisation, a survey was designed to collect information about digital preservation practice and plans amongst all LIBER member libraries to inform future activity of LIBER’s Working Group on Preservation and Digital Curation. The survey focused on the digital preservation of digitised material.

The major findings are as follows:

  • Some LIBER members have already been engaged in digitisation activities. The number of institutions with digitisation activities and the volume of digitised material are expected to grow further in the future.
  • There is a mismatch between the perceived high value of digitised material and the frequent lack of a written policy/ procedure addressing the digital preservation of these collections. A number of the institutions without an according written policy stated they were working on developing and establishing one.
  • Storage and development of tools are areas where considerable investments are made by the majority of institutions surveyed. Those are also the fields where many of the institutions face difficulties.
  • Investments in staff assigned to digital preservation task are still inadequate at several institutions.
  • Some digital preservation practices and basic integrity measurements are more widespread than others. More than half of the institutions which responded already have an archive dedicated to digitised collections in place, use preservation metadata standards and format restrictions to support preservation, have processes of bitstream preservation implemented and provide staff training in the area of digital preservation. One can identify a clear tendency that emulation strategy is less commonly used than migration and other migration supporting practices.
  • Difficulties in establishing digital archives with a functioning preservation system, the frequent lack of institutional strategies concerning digitisation and digital preservation and funding problems seem to be amongst the most serious problems faced by LIBER members.

Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report

Jerome McDonough et al. have self-archived Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report in IDEALS.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report includes findings from the entire project team on issues relating to the preservation of video games and interaction fiction, including issues around library & archival collection development/management, bibliographic description, copyright & intellectual property, preservation strategies, metadata & packaging, and next steps for both the professional and research community with regards to these complex and important resources.

"Research Data: Who Will Share What, with Whom, When, and Why?"

Christine L. Borgman has self-archived "Research Data: Who Will Share What, with Whom, When, and Why?" in SelectedWorks.

Here's an excerpt:

The deluge of scientific research data has excited the general public, as well as the scientific community, with the possibilities for better understanding of scientific problems, from climate to culture. For data to be available, researchers must be willing and able to share them. The policies of governments, funding agencies, journals, and university tenure and promotion committees also influence how, when, and whether research data are shared. Data are complex objects. Their purposes and the methods by which they are produced vary widely across scientific fields, as do the criteria for sharing them. To address these challenges, it is necessary to examine the arguments for sharing data and how those arguments match the motivations and interests of the scientific community and the public. Four arguments are examined: to make the results of publicly funded data available to the public, to enable others to ask new questions of extant data, to advance the state of science, and to reproduce research. Libraries need to consider their role in the face of each of these arguments, and what expertise and systems they require for data curation.

"Keeping Research Data Safe Factsheet"

Charles Beagrie Limited has released the "Keeping Research Data Safe Factsheet."

Here's an excerpt:

This factsheet illustrates for institutions, researchers, and funders some of the key findings and recommendations from the JISC-funded Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS1) and Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) projects.