Category: Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

"The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise"

Christopher J. Shaffer has published "The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise" in the latest issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Libraries have provided services to researchers for many years. Changes in technology and new publishing models provide opportunities for libraries to be more involved in the research enterprise. Within this article, the author reviews traditional library services, briefly describes the eScience and publishing landscape as it relates to libraries, and explores possible library programs in support of research. Many of the new opportunities require new partnerships, both within the institution and externally.

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State of the Art Report on Damage Prevention and Repair of Digital AV Media

The DAVID consortium has released State of the Art Report on Damage Prevention and Repair of Digital AV Media.

Here's an excerpt:

This report contains information on the state of the art in digital damage prevention and repair of audio-visual media. It has been compiled in course of the project definition of DAVID. The DAVID project addresses specific research questions for preservation and restoration of audio-visual media. An overview on the projects rationale is presented in section 2, details on the continuing project can be found at www.david-preservation.eu.

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"Twenty-Five Shades of Greycite: Semantics for Referencing and Preservation"

Phillip Lord and Lindsay Marshall have self-archived "Twenty-Five Shades of Greycite: Semantics for Referencing and Preservation" in arXiv.org .

Here's an excerpt:

Semantic publishing can enable richer documents with clearer, computationally interpretable properties. For this vision to become reality, however, authors must benefit from this process, so that they are incentivised to add these semantics. Moreover, the publication process that generates final content must allow and enable this semantic content. Here we focus on author-led or "grey" literature, which uses a convenient and simple publication pipeline. We describe how we have used metadata in articles to enable richer referencing of these articles and how we have customised the addition of these semantics to articles. Finally, we describe how we use the same semantics to aid in digital preservation and non-repudiability of research articles

.

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The Web Archiving Life Cycle Model

Archive-It has released the The Web Archiving Life Cycle Model.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to address the lack of best practices and to increase awareness of the importance of web archiving as fundamental to digital preservation, the Archive-It team developed the Web Archiving Life Cycle Model (WALCM). This model is based on the team's experiences as well as lessons learned from countless partner institutions, including in-depth case studies of six of those institutions. The WALCM is an attempt to represent common workflows and create a measurable model for organizations to reference in order to create or improve their web archiving programs.

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"Scholars and Their Blogs: Characteristics, Preferences, and Perceptions Impacting Digital Preservation"

Carolyn F. Hank has self-archived "Scholars and Their Blogs: Characteristics, Preferences, and Perceptions Impacting Digital Preservation" in the Carolina Digital Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

This descriptive study investigated scholars who blog in the areas of history, economics, law, biology, chemistry and physics, as well as attributes of their respective blogs. It offers an examination of scholars' attitudes and perceptions of their blogs in relation to the system of scholarly communication and their preferences for digital preservation.. . . Most feel their blogs should be preserved for both personal and public access and use into the indefinite, rather than short-term, future. Scholars who blog identify themselves as most responsible for blog preservation. Concerning capability, scholars perceive blog service providers, hosts, and networks as most capable. National and institutional-based libraries and archives, as well as institutional IT departments, are perceived as least responsible and capable for preservation of scholars' respective blogs.

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"Developing Researcher Skills in Research Data Management: Training for the Future—A DataPool Project Report"

Dorothy Byatt, Mark Scott, F. Gareth Beale, Simon J. Cox, and Wendy White have self-archived "Developing Researcher Skills in Research Data Management: Training for the Future—A DataPool Project Report" in ePrints Soton.

Here's an excerpt:

This report will look at the multi-level approach to developing researcher skills in research data management in the University of Southampton, developed as part of the training strand of the JISC DataPool project, and embedded into the University engagement with research data management.

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"A Systemic Approach to the Preservation of Audio Documents: Methodology and Software Tools"

Federica Bressan and Sergio Canazza have published "A Systemic Approach to the Preservation of Audio Documents: Methodology and Software Tools" in the Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents a methodology for the preservation of audio documents, the operational protocol that acts as the methodology, and an original open source software system that supports and automatizes several tasks along the process. The methodology is presented in the light of the ethical debate that has been challenging the international archival community for the last thirty years. The operational protocol reflects the methodological principles adopted by the authors, and its effectiveness is based on the results obtained in recent research projects involving some of the finest audio archives in Europe. Some recommendations are given for the rerecording process, aimed at minimizing the information loss and at quantifying the unintentional alterations introduced by the technical equipment. Finally, the paper introduces an original software system that guides and supports the preservation staff along the process, reducing the processing timing, automatizing tasks, minimizing errors, and using information hiding strategies to ease the cognitive load. Currently the software system is in use in several international archives.

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"Research Object for Scholarly Communication (ROSC) Community Group Charter"

Jun Zhao of the University of Oxford has released the "Research Object for Scholarly Communication (ROSC) Community Group Charter." ROSC is a W3C group.

Here's an excerpt:

The primary goal of the Community Group is to provide a platform for scholars, librarians, publishers, archivists and policy makers to exchange requirements and expectations for supporting a new form of scholarly communication, i.e. making the actual research assets available as first-class objects to enable better reuse and reproduce of research results and knowledge. These research assets, including data used and generated in an investigation, methods used for producing the data, as well as people and organisations involved in the study, are what we call Research Objects.

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Digital Curation Preparation: A Survey of Contributors to International Professional, Educational, and Research Venues

The UNC at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science has released Digital Curation Preparation: A Survey of Contributors to International Professional, Educational, and Research Venues.

Here's an excerpt:

The article centers on the contexts of digital curation research as framed by the educational, professional, and research interests of a diverse group of national and international stakeholders. Flexible, holistic, and inherently interdisciplinary, digital curation initiatives depend upon a lifecycle approach. Thus the administered survey culled information about respondents' educational degrees and the academic disciplines in which they were earned, their employment options, job titles, professional association memberships, professional event attendance, and professional publications read. Finally, the paper discusses results, implications, and directions for future research.

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"Private But Eventually Public: Why Copyright in Unpublished Works Matters in the Digital Age"

Damien McCallig has published "Private But Eventually Public: Why Copyright in Unpublished Works Matters in the Digital Age" in the latest issue of SCRIPTed.

Here's an excerpt:

Digital life is no longer only concerned with online communication between living individuals; it now encompasses post-death phenomena of inheritance, legacy, mourning and further uses of our digital remains. Scholars and practitioners seeking an appropriate legal theory to claim, control and recover the digital remains of the dead and protect post-mortem privacy interests have identified copyright as a possible surrogate.

This article explores the links between copyright and privacy in unpublished works. It charts the historical development of perpetual copyright protection in unpublished works, reviews the reasons why perpetual protection for unpublished works has been abolished and analyses some of the privacy impacts of these changes. It argues that without perpetual copyright protection and the surrogate privacy protections in unpublished works, the fear that one's digital remains will eventually be opened to societal scrutiny may lead to the fettering of personal and private communication, while alive, and may promote the deletion of one's digital remains in contemplation of death.

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"Workflow Tools for Digital Curation"

Andrew James Weidner and Daniel Gelaw Alemneh have published "Workflow Tools for Digital Curation" in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Maintaining usable and sustainable digital collections requires a complex set of actions that address the many challenges at various stages of the digital object lifecycle. Digital curation activities enhance access and retrieval, maintain quality, add value, and facilitate use and re-use over time. Digital resource lifecycle management is becoming an increasingly important topic as digital curators actively explore software tools that perform metadata curation and file management tasks. Accordingly, the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries develop tools and workflows that streamline production and quality assurance activities. This article demonstrates two open source software tools, AutoHotkey and Selenium IDE, which the UNT Digital Libraries Division has adopted for use during the pre-ingest and post-ingest stages of the digital resource lifecycle.

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Video of Herbert Van de Sompel’s "From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record" Speech

CNI has released a video of Herbert Van de Sompel's plenary session "From the Version of Record to a Version of the Record" at the CNI Spring 2013 Membership Meeting.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The atomic and static PDF files of the early ejournals days are rapidly being replaced by bundles of dynamic and interdependent resources that are distributed across the Web. These changes present technical challenges regarding information interoperability and long-term preservation, but they also yield broader challenges related to stewardship, access, the delineation of the scholarly record, and the very notion of the version of record. In the same time frame, both the Web and our understanding of its architecture have evolved, which has motivated recent information interoperability efforts—OAI Object Reuse and Exchange, Memento, and ResourceSync—to look at technical challenges from a Web-centric, instead of a repository-centric, perspective, possibly marking a trend to fully embrace the Web as infrastructure for scholarly communication.

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"What Copyright Owes the Future"

R. Anthony Reese has self-archived "What Copyright Owes the Future" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This Lecture explores the subject of preserving copyrighted works for the future in four steps. First, I look at why preserving creative works is important and valuable. Next, I examine the ways in which copyright law has traditionally encouraged—or not encouraged—the preservation of copyrighted works. Third, I explore how digital technology and computer networks, such as the Internet, pose new challenges for preserving creative works. And finally, I consider briefly how we might rethink and revise copyright law to respond to the challenges of preserving works of authorship for future audiences.

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"Academic Librarians and Research Data Services: Preparation and Attitudes"

Carol Tenopir, Robert J. Sandusky, Suzie Allard, and Ben Birch have published "Academic Librarians and Research Data Services: Preparation and Attitudes" in the latest issue of IFLA Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Research funding bodies recognize the importance of infrastructure and services to organize and preserve research data, and academic research libraries have been identified as locations in which to base these research data services (RDS). Research data services include data management planning, digital curation (selection, preservation, maintenance, and archiving), and metadata creation and conversion. We report the results of an empirical investigation into the RDS practices of librarians in US and Canadian academic research libraries, establishing a baseline of the engagement of librarians at this early stage of widespread service development. Specifically, this paper examines the opinions of the surveyed librarians regarding their preparedness to provide RDS (background, skills, and education), their attitudes regarding the importance of RDS for their libraries and institutions, and the factors that contribute to or inhibit librarian engagement in RDS.

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"Drowning in Research Data: Addressing Data Management Literacy of Graduate Students"

ACRL has released "Drowning in Research Data: Addressing Data Management Literacy of Graduate Students" as part of the ACRL 2013 Proceedings..

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we will discuss findings from our research study of social sciences and science graduate students' levels of research data management literacy, which include attitudes and behaviours, and formal and informal education experiences. Using an online survey of Canadian graduate students in the social sciences and science, we were able to reach a large number of students across the country and to gather sufficient responses to allow us to offer some insights on the overall graduate student research data management landscape.

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"Evaluating PREMIS in an Academic Research Library"

ACRL has released "Evaluating PREMIS in an Academic Research Library" as part of the ACRL 2013 Proceedings.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper provides a survey of the collections at the UVa Library, a review of the PREMIS metadata standard, and an overview of the task force's findings related to evaluation of the standard and recommendations for PREMIS implementation at the UVa Library. The authors hope that by providing this example of one library's attempt to adopt PREMIS, other libraries can plan their own evaluation and implementation.

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"Dealing with Data: Science Librarians’ Participation in Data Management at Association of Research Libraries Institutions"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Dealing with Data: Science Librarians' Participation in Data Management at Association of Research Libraries Institutions"

Here's an excerpt:

This study, a survey of science librarians at institutions affiliated with the Association of Research Libraries, investigates science librarians' awareness of and involvement in institutional repositories, data repositories, and data management support services at their institutions. The study also explores the roles and responsibilities, both new and traditional, that science librarians have assumed related to data management, and the skills that science librarians believe are necessary to meet the demands of data management work. The results reveal themes of both uncertainty and optimism—uncertainty about the roles of librarians, libraries, and other campus entities; uncertainty about the skills that will be required; but also optimism about applying "traditional" librarian skills to this emerging field of academic librarianship.

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How to Develop Research Data Management Services—A Guide for HEIs

The Digital Curation Centre has released How to Develop Research Data Management Services—A Guide for HEIs.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this guide is to help institutions understand the key aims and issues associated with planning and implementing research data management (RDM) services. It explains the components and processes of RDM services and describes the roles and responsibilities of those who will deliver and use them.

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Is the Future of Preservation Cloudy? (Dagstuhl Seminar 12472)

Weitere Beteiligte, Erik Elmroth, Michael Factor, Ethan Miller, and Margo Seltzer have self-archived Is the Future of Preservation Cloudy? (Dagstuhl Seminar 12472) in DROPS.

Here's an excerpt:

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12472 "Is the Future of Preservation Cloudy?". Our seminar was composed of a series of panels structured as a series of brief presentations followed by an open discussion. The seminar started with a session introducing key concepts and definitions and illuminating the vast array of perspectives from which attendees were addressing issues of cloud and preservation. We them proceeded into a discussion of requirements from different types of communities and a subsequent discussion on how to protect the data and ensure its integrity and reliability. We next considered issues related to cloud infrastructure, in particular related to management of the bits and logical obsolescence. We also considered the economics of preservation and the ability to reuse knowledge. In addition to these pre-planned panels, we had three breakout sessions that were identified by the participants: automated appraisal, design for forgetting, and PaaS/SaaS for data preservation. After the executive summary, we present summaries of the panels and reports on the breakout sessions, followed by brief abstracts from a majority of the seminar participants describing the material they presented in the panels.

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"Fair Use & Mass Digitization: The Future of Copy-Dependent Technologies after Authors Guild v. Hathitrust"

Angel Siegfried Diaz has self-archived "Fair Use & Mass Digitization: The Future of Copy-Dependent Technologies after Authors Guild v. Hathitrust" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt from:

This note discusses the future of digital libraries and other products reliant on mass digitization in the wake of the Hathitrust decision. First, this note presents an overview of U.S. copyright protection and the ways in which its goal of incentivizing authors has consistently been balanced by efforts to protect preservation, access, and fair use. . . .

Second, this note discusses the trial court opinion in Authors Guild v. Hathitrust and the court's fair use finding regarding the full-text search index and copies for the print disabled. . . .

Third, this note discusses the Hathitrust decision's effect on the future of the Google Books case and argues that the fair use ruling paves the road for a similar finding while also giving Google leverage in its ongoing settlement negotiations. . . .

Fourth, after exploring the judicial efforts to protect useful technologies as a matter of public policy, this note explores legislative solutions that would better advance copyright's goals of promoting education, research, preservation, and access.

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Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program has released Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving

Here's an excerpt:

Our digital preservation blog, The Signal, is a major outlet for addressing personal digital archiving. Over the last two years, the blog has featured three categories of stories on the topic:

  • Discussions about applying the guidance listed in the Preserving Your Digital Memories section of our website.
  • Narratives about real-world encounters with personal digital preservation issues.
  • Descriptions of the outreach we have undertaken to connect with institutions and individuals to promote personal digital archiving.

We have gathered the most useful posts in each of these categories into this electronic publication. Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving is intended as resource for individuals—and the institutions that serve them—to meet a critical challenge. Our aim is for it to be a primer for the digital archive novice, as well as a refresher for those with more experience.

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Report on Research Libraries Readiness for Sustainable Digital Preservation

APARSEN has released the Business Preparedness Report.

Here's an excerpt:

This report presents the results of a European-wide online survey for assessing the preparedness of research libraries (as represented by the members of LIBER) in regard to economically-sustainable digital preservation. The survey investigated the preparedness in accordance to the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Task Force and the results have been mapped to these recommendations to identify Implementation Gaps. The further analyses of these Gaps will allow key stakeholders to intervene in a prioritized way and to facilitate progress of digital preservation to become an economically sustainable practice.

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Report on Cost Parameters for Digital Repositories

APARSEN has released the Report on Cost Parameters for Digital Repositories.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this report is to present our analysis of published cost models. A review of cost parameters for the selected models focused on how cost parameters mapped to the International Standard for Trusted Repositories (ISO 16363) which enabled us to assess the areas of; Organisational Infrastructure, Digital Object Management and Infrastructure and Security Risk Management. The purpose was to assess whether cost models were measuring, through their parameters, the relevant activities for a trusted digital repository.

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What EDINA Does: A Community Report

EDINA has released What EDINA Does: A Community Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Universities and colleges across the UK making use of our services enjoy high quality online support documentation and helpful case studies. Flagship services include JISC MediaHub, Digimap Collections, and SUNCAT (with respective focus on multimedia, geo-spatial data and mapping for teaching and research, and the scholarly statement made in journals). . . .

What follows in this booklet also acts as a showcase for our current project activities; the key investments for present and future services. These include innovation to support use on the 'mobile Internet', both mobility and multi-platform delivery and interaction, as part of the national and international development of the 'spatial data infrastructure', including leadership in the citizen observatory (COBWEB) project funded by the EU. There is also significant contribution to the wider definition of digital infrastructure, geared to ensure ease and continuity of access, both for discovery and for stewardship (preservation) of the digital resources that research and education require, such as The Keepers Registry (for e-journals) and now the UK RepositoryNet+ initiative and its service components to assist universities and research institutes with the Open Access agenda and research reporting. More about the product of our research and development project activity is found in the project archive pages of our website.

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