Category: Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

British Library and Portico Collaborate on E-journal Preservation

British Library and Portico will collaborate on preserving the Library's e-journal collection.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The partnership will help the British Library—along with five other legal deposit libraries—to meet regulations that recently became law in the United Kingdom and that extend the practice of legal deposit from traditional print publications to non-print publications such as e-journals, blogs and websites in the UK web domain.

Portico will utilize its established workflow and processes to create standardized and uniform journal content that can be exported to the British Library. They have started with 1,500 journals from three publishers that are already preserving content with Portico. As necessary, Portico will develop new tools for processing additional publisher content.

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Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 3

Digital Scholarship has released version 3 of the Research Data Curation Bibliography. This selective bibliography includes over 230 English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions.

The "digital curation" concept is still evolving. In "Digital Curation and Trusted Repositories: Steps toward Success," Christopher A. Lee and Helen R. Tibbo define digital curation as follows:

Digital curation involves selection and appraisal by creators and archivists; evolving provision of intellectual access; redundant storage; data transformations; and, for some materials, a commitment to long-term preservation. Digital curation is stewardship that provides for the reproducibility and re-use of authentic digital data and other digital assets. Development of trustworthy and durable digital repositories; principles of sound metadata creation and capture; use of open standards for file formats and data encoding; and the promotion of information management literacy are all essential to the longevity of digital resources and the success of curation efforts.

Most sources have been published from January 2000 through June 2012; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included.

The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. If such versions are unavailable, italicized links to the publishers' descriptions are provided.

It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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2013 NDSA Innovation Award Winners

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group has announced the 2013 NDSA Innovation Award winners.

Here's an excerpt:

Please join us in congratulating the 2013 Innovation Award winners:

Future Steward: Martin Gengenbach, Gates Archive. Martin is recognized for his work documenting digital forensics tools and workflows, especially his paper,"The Way We Do it Here: Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows in Collecting Institutions" and his work cataloging the DFXML schema.

Individual: Kim Schroeder, Wayne State University. Kim is recognized for her work as a mentor to future digital stewards in her role as a lecturer in Digital Preservation at Wayne State University, where she helped establish the first NDSA Student Group, supported the student-lead colloquium on digital preservation, and worked to facilitate collaboration between students in digital stewardship and local cultural heritage organizations.

Project: DataUp, California Digital Library. DataUp is recognized for creating an open-source tool uniquely built to assist individuals aiming to preserve research datasets by guiding them through the digital stewardship workflow process from dataset creation and description to the deposit of their datasets into public repositories.

Organization: Archive Team. The Archive Team , a self-described "loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage," is recognized for both for its aggressive, vital work in preserving websites and digital content slated for deletion and for its work advocating for the preservation of digital culture within the technology and computing sectors.

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Web Archiving

The Digital Preservation Coalition has released Web Archiving.

Here's an excerpt:

Web archiving technology enables the capture, preservation and reproduction of valuable content from the live web in an archival setting, so that it can be independently managed and preserved for future generations. This report introduces and discusses the key issues faced by organizations engaged in web archiving initiatives, whether they are contracting out to a third party service provider or managing the process in-house. It follows this with an overview of the main software applications and tools currently available. Selection and deployment of the most appropriate tools is contextual: organizations are advised to select the approach that best meets their business needs and drivers, and which they are able to support technically. Three case studies are included to illustrate the different operational contexts, drivers, and solutions that can be implemented.

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"Making Research Data Repositories Visible: The re3data.org Registry"

Heinz Pampel et al. have self-archived "Making Research Data Repositories Visible: The re3data.org Registry" in PeerJ PrePrints.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers require infrastructures that ensure a maximum of accessibility, stability and reliability to facilitate working with and sharing of research data. Such infrastructures are being increasingly summarized under the term Research Data Repositories (RDR). The project re3data.org—Registry of Research Rata Repositories has begun to index research data repositories in 2012 and offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of the heterogeneous research data repository landscape. Information icons help researchers to easily identify an adequate repository for the storage and reuse of their data. This article describes the RDR landscape, outlines the practicality of re3data.org as a service, and shows how this service helps to find research data.

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Research Data Management in Practice

The Australian National Data Service has released Research Data Management in Practice.

Here's an excerpt:

ANDS has commissioned this "Research Data Management Practice Guide" as a practical starting point that focuses on the 'Why' and 'How' of good data and risk management, with plenty of references for further reading for readers who need more detail. . . .

The Practice Guide is aimed at research administrators in the e-research space, providing them with an overview for the planning and operations of sharing research data, thereby creating better opportunities for data re-use. It is acknowledged that no single person or even business unit is responsible for all aspects of research data management and that a collaborative approach is required. In all cases this will involve the researcher/data creator.

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"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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