Aligning with most of the world (iPRES2011, 8)

iPRES is organized alternately in Europe, in North-America and in Asia in order to include people and discussions from all continents – Africa and South-America are still on the Steering Committee’s wish list. However, when you looked at the list of presenters at iPRES2011, it was the usual suspects that dominated: Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand. I asked a Programme Committee member about that, and he told me that some papers had been submitted from Asia, but they were deemed not good enough to make it to the programme.

To my mind, there is a bit of a contradiction in this. Of course we want high-quality papers at iPRES, but it is a bit risky to take our (western) stage of development as a yard stick for what constitutes “quality”. As Cal Lee phrased it: “Digital preservation tends to be quite regionally myopic.” I would suggest that the next iPRES organize a special track or workshop day for those that are just beginning to think about digital preservation, or that work from a very different context than a “western” one and focus on their specific circumstances and challenges.

Fortunately, there was one workshop that expressly invited members from “other” countries. It was the workshop “Aligning national approaches to digital preservation”, a follow-up from last May’s Tallinn conference (see my blog posts), put together by Cal Lee from the University of North Carolina. Yes, there were usual suspects presenting as well (including yours truly), but in this post I shall mostly  ignore them in favour of new input:

Özgür Külcü, from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, described Turkish participation in the AccessIT project, whereby an online education module with practical information about digitisation issues and protection of cultural heritage was developed. And in the context of the InterPares 3 project the Turkish team is helping translate digital preservation theory into concrete action plans for organizations with limited resources. But many issues remain:

Masaki Shibata from Japan, revealed the results of a DRAMBORA 2.0 test audit carried out at the National Diet Library in Japan:

Shibata admitted that, unfortunately, the risks mentioned in the final report largely remain unsolved. ‘We were caught up in an illusion that there was an ideal solution to ensure long-term digital preservation,’ he said. ‘We tried to address the risks only by means of systems development.’ Also, specific Japanese and NDL circumstances played a role, such as the rigidness of the fiscal, budget, employment and personnel system; language difficulties and geographical constraints; lack of digital conservators; and a cultural context of preservation. Shibata concluded that an international alliance for digital preservation ‘would become a boost/tailwind for national policymaking in Japan.’

Daisy Selematsela from the National Research Foundation of the Republic of South Africa, described the outcomes of An audit of South African digitisation initiatives before focussing on “Managing Digital Collections: a collaborative initiative on the South African Framework”, a report published earlier this year, which is meant to provide data producers with high-level principles for managing data throughout the digital collection life cycle; and the Train-the-trainer programme:

As for international alignment, Selematsela concluded:

Raju Buddharaju of the National Library of Singapore (photo right) suggested that we first need a better understanding of what we mean  “alignment” and what we mean by digital preservation (what do we include, what do we exclude)  before we can try and come to workable initiatives.

The workshop was originally designed as a one-day event, but in the end the conference organizers only gave us 3 hours on Friday afternoon. The good news was that despite the time of day and conference fatigue, more than fourty participants showed up and they conducted animated discussions on such topics as: costs; public policy and society; and preservation & access.

But it was difficult to reach any concrete conclusions. There are many good intentions, but it continues to be difficult to find the common ground that leads to practical results. Steve Knight of the National Library of New Zealand (photo left) questioned whether there is any real will to collaborate, e.g., on putting together a much-needed international format (technical) registry. Talking about education, finally, Andi Rauber suggested that because there is no well-defined body of knowledge, we might prefer a range of “friendly competing curricula” rather than an aligned body – for the time being.

Which only goes to show that, like Singapore itself, alignment comes in many shapes and sizes.

On alignment (when we do and don’t need it), and on the Elephants in the Room (ANADP11–10, Evaluation)

ANADP11 was a conference about (inter)national alignment – and organizing a conference around such a theme implies that we need more of it. I offer you my tentative conclusions, a fortnight after the conference:

Sometimes aligning is as easy as hopping on a plane and attending a conference in Tallinn. Nothing tops meeting people face to face to exchange ideas and information. Much of the (technical) information can, of course, be found on the internet, but in our day-to-day lives we rarely have or make the time to actually find and read it all. Also: having an actual conversation about something is much more informative than one-way traffic. This type of alignment really requires no more than a bunch of enthusiastic people who are willing to put in a lot of time into putting conferences such as these together (thanks! Matt Schultz, Katherine Skinner, Martin Halbert, Aaron Trehub, Abigail Potter, Martha Anderson, Michelle Galinger and, last but not least, Mari Kannusaar of the Estonian National Library): the Tallinn conversation was an important type of alignment in and of itself in the way it was organized around themes, with panels discussing the issues before the conference.

Alignment networks become a little more formal when organizations actually start doing projects together: the Open Planets Foundation, the Alliance for Permanent Access, the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the national digital preservation coalitions (nestor, DPC, NCDD). These are foundations with by-laws. Typically, they will run outreach and R&D programs together. A more informal, but very successful type of network is the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). It is fluid, it is informal. One wonders whether these need more international alignment than they already have. Perhaps more of these groupings are called for, especially in countries that have not yet embraced the issue of digital preservation, but if so, then these must really be bottom-up initiatives.

The organizational panel’s breakout session pleaded for fluid, informal international alignment rather than an international steering committee, as proposed by Laura Campbell in her keynote address.

Alignment of necessity becomes more formal when organizations start sharing the burden of digital preservation: LOCKSS, the MetaArchive, etc. Taking care of each others’ collections requires governance contracts to be drawn up. However, one wonders if these types of initiatives are in need of more or further international alignment; they seem to work best when similar organizations (similar as in: close together, with similar remits, of similar size, within the same scientific discipline) group together to do a very practical job. I thought the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (blog post) was a particularly powerful example which can inspire others. We definitely need to continue to organize conferences to highlight such initiatives for others to learn (and enable our staff to come to these conferences despite budget cuts …), but whether they need more (international) alignment as such … I wonder.

Sharing the burden of preservation requires more robust support, but often at a local and/or disciplinary level (St. Catherine’s passage, Tallinn)

Technical development, then, and standards. Are we reinventing the wheel over and over again? Will alignment help us save money? Yes and no. Of course we would save a lot of money in the short run if we were all to adopt the same technology. However, digital preservation is a moving target. Michael Seadle and Andreas Rauber assured us that all our present systems are untested; they are, indeed, “a leap of faith”. So this is no time to “rush into standards” (Bram van der Werf). In other words: exchanging experiences, exchanging test data: yes; throwing all of our eggs into one basket at this (early) point in time: definitely not. We need to allow for diversity in preservation strategies and tools to develop. This will, of course, lead to some redundancy, but that is all in the game.

So far, we have made a strong case for more conferences, more conversations, more debates, more projects, more comparing of notes, more sharing of experiences (test data, best and, yes please, worst practices), the establishment of fluid, informal affinity groups to share knowledge. Plus more formal alignment on a local or national scale when organizations actually start collaborating in preserving their digital collections. But we have not yet made the case for more international alignment. Unless … one thinks about …

An international digital preservation registry?

During the conference the call was heard for some type of international registry of projects, initiatives, knowledge, competences, etc. I have heard that call before, and it would be great to have such a facility? A one-stop portal where everything that we know about what is being preserved by whom, everything we are studying (including everything we have found out that does not work), and perhaps even more importantly, everybody involved in DP and their special expertise, is linked up and a brokering services brings supply and demand together. Not a project, but a sustained effort by the international community.

The trouble with that is that we had something like that, the PADI service, run by the Australian National Library. But, as Maurizio Lunghi (photo left) explained at the conference, that service was discontinued last year. The website is still up, but it is not being maintained any more. PADI went down, Lunghi told us, because it started out as an international effort, but in the course of time it became isolated, and the Australian National Library was doing all the work alone. PADI became too isolated. And that is the trouble with this type of registry/competence center. Everybody wants it, but establishing and maintaining one is very labour-intensive. Especially in difficult economic times such as the present, our institutions’ management will not prioritise active knowledge sharing. Which is understandable in the short term, but obviously unwise in the long term. I have been involved in organizing something like this at a national scale, and apart from the staff effort involved, it is also very difficult to make all that knowledge and experience available in a form that is useful to users – simply because there are so many users with so many different needs.

But wouldn’t it be great … I am not giving up the idea and I welcome anybody to think this through with me!

The Digital Elephants in the Room

So much for the problems that we did discuss. Now for the ones we did not discuss (enough). Clifford Lynch called them the Elephants in the Room, the issues we chose not to talk about because … yes, well, why did not we discuss them? I have a couple of theories. For one, the conference room was dominated by librarians – there were very few people from the archives, museums, or from scientific repositories. That was a shame, because it limits the scope of issues to be discussed. Particularly, those issues that transcend traditional borders between domains and sectors were not talked about nearly enough. And I would argue that these are the very issues where we absolutely need international alignment because there is no other way to deal with them. Here is my list of these Key Issues (which I will be happy to develop further with anybody who wants to join the debate):

• Lots and lots of digital content is being produced at the moment that no heritage institution is collecting, because it does not fall within traditional collection profiles. It is high time we get together at a high policy level, with representatives from a broad range of organizations (museums, libraries, archives, scientific institutions) to talk about this huge challenge. This involves talking about data deluges (in science, but also in social media; audiovisual output for which there is no Public Records Act and no Legal Deposit Scheme), it definitely involves talking about selection (what to keep?), and who is going to do the keeping (distribute the work? establish new organizations?)
• Making the case of digital preservation towards funders and the public at large. This is a big one. It may force us to take another look at the assumptions underlying our work before we can get this right. Which is not something people particularly like doing. But we’ve got to do it, make sure that we talk with one voice. Can we write the success cases to prove our point?
• Where do we put our money? Both in Europe and in the US substantial amounts of money are invested in digital preservation research. But is R&D attacking the right problems? Where should we put our money to really start bringing costs of digital preservation down?
• Should effective copyright action be in this list? Clifford Lynch suggested that we get some smart people from both sides of the ocean together to really get to the bottom of the issue and organize an effective lobby to truly bring about a fundamental change in thinking about the individual (producer’s) rights versus public rights.
• Dare we think of an international registry that will really allow the international community for reinventing wheels only where alternatives really are beneficial?

At the end of the day I think I can say that no, we did not get everything right at this first ANADP conference. But we made a good start at filtering out the issues and deciding where they should be addressed and by whom. That in itself is important. There is talk of a follow-up workshop at iPRES and there is talk of a follow-up ANADP. Let’s try to include more parties there (more countries, more domains), let’s try to bring more decision makers to the debate, and let’s try to narrow the issues down to those areas where alignment is truly essential.

My favorite conference recommendation, by Jeremy York of HathiTrust: ‘Developing killer digital preservation apps’

This is the last of a series of 11 blog posts about the Tallinn conference. The others were:

1. The ANADP conference, introduction
2. Keynote Campbell & Estonian Angels
3. Sharing our weaknesses
4. Organizational variety
5. Are we rushing into standards?
6. Legal Alignment? Forget it!
7. Economic sustainability: update with ESRM slides
8. The right mind-set: on education
9. Clifford Lynch’s synthesis
10. Corrections and additions

Martin Halbert (left) and Matt Schultz of Educopia, two of the driving forces behind this initiative to open up a transcontinental policy debate.

Many thanks to Mari Kannusaar of the Estonian National Library (right), thanks to her colleague Leila and all the other colleagues for a smooth conference!

This is the last of a series of 11 blog posts about the Tallinn conference. The others were:

1. The ANADP conference, introduction
2. Keynote Campbell & Estonian Angels
3. Sharing our weaknesses
4. Organizational variety
5. Are we rushing into standards?
6. Legal Alignment? Forget it!
7. Economic sustainability: update with ESRM slides
8. The right mind-set: on education
9. Clifford Lynch’s synthesis
10. Corrections and additions

Clifford Lynch’s synthesis – ANADP11 (9)

Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information has a remarkable talent for analyzing a lot of information and bringing it together in a synthesis. Throughout the conference you could see him sitting quietly somewhere in the audience, digesting what happened, pondering it, and drawing his conclusions (photo right and photo below).

I am not sure that it is entirely appropriate to synthesize the synthesizer, but I do want to give you some highlights from Cliff’s ‘opinionated synthesis’ (the highlights themselves, of course, being opinionated as well …).

 

‘Yes, alignment is very necessary,’ Cliff started out, because:

• Working in the same direction makes much needed collaboration possible;
• Everybody will benefit from mutual support and shared learning.
• What Cliff did not hear enough about at the conference: Collectively we can make a much more effective case towards governments, funders and society at large. (Cliff: ‘It is of fundamental importance that we clarify and educate.’)

The six axes of alignment dealt with in the conference interrelate in very complicated ways, of course, but Cliff took the conference outline as his point of departure anyway.

Technical panel

• Testing & benchmarking are very important topics. We need to learn to do this better and we need to introduce scale into the equation. This ties into the economic angle: we need to test commercial products.
• ‘There is some glib talk about interoperability’; we need to be more specific: what? how? what goals?
• What Cliff did not hear enough about at the conference, was the danger of a monoculture. We must be careful not to align too much; we need diversity to further develop the field.
• Two areas deserve more attention: the bit storage layer (how to trade off between partners? what is the role of commercial services? what about standards?; and, secondly, security and integrity. ‘Just imagine the impact if somebody would raid and Wikileak all the embargo collections we hold …’ The stakes are substantial!

Organizational panel

• Cliff thought that the honesty displayed by yours truly (see blog) was ‘wonderful’, and contained ‘lessons for all’. I humbly thank Cliff for this comment – and hope that others will be motivated to follow the example.
• We are moving from cooperation in short-term projects into cooperation in fundamental, on-going programs, which is a very good thing.
• What Cliff missed: information about aligning strategies within national borders: what variation is there in assigning levels there. He also missed more conversation about the question of replication – what choices have to be made? What about autonomy and interdependence?

Standards panel

• Some standards may not be DP-specific, but as they characterize the materials we deal with, they are relevant.
• There is a thicket of analytic standards – and maybe  we are rushing prematurely into some of them. Perhaps it is better to talk about ‘best practices’ for the time being.

Legal panel

• The legal issues are becoming more dominant all the time.
• Cliff was impressed by the report of the Comité des sages and the efforts it reflects to define collective EU principles on copyright.
• Cliff suggested that a bunch of smart people from both sides of the ocean get together to drive policy on copyright matters. [Would not that be great – is it feasible?]

Educational panel

• A lot of curricula feed back into national programs.
• We are focused on educating professionals – but we should also start training people outside our field and the general public. The ‘national preservation week’ launched by the Library of Congress is a great initiative to Make the Case for digital preservation.

Economic panel

• A very important distinction: digitization is very different from digital preservation when it comes to funding. The latter has no immediate payoffs and is thus harder to fund.
• We did not talk much about scale; more attention required, in combination with cost models.
• When it comes to sustainability, the very fact that we define certain goods as public is in itself a sustainability strategy.
• Instability in public funding is a nightmare!
• We should pay some more attention to the connection between risk management and costs both for physical and for digital materials.

The elephants in the room

According to Cliff, the elephant in the room (a topic that is avoided by implication) is the data deluge in e-science, Big Data. As e-science drives both education and technology, this is very relevant. But national libraries are not paying much attention to what happens in Big Data.

Perhaps a smaller elephant is audiovisual content, both physical and digital. This information is expensive to maintain, and AV materials seem to be the step children of national collection strategies.

Another elephant: What is the extent of born-digital material – government, commercial, social media. We do not have a good assessment of this content yet.

If we ever have another conference like this, Cliff suggested that we add two more axes to the discussion: Making the Case towards funders and the public at large; and: Strategic alignment of collection policies (personal records, social media, games, news: who preserves what?).

(PS: Just in case you wonder: ANADP11, blog post no. 8 is still to come; I am waiting for some necessary information.)

The right mind-set: training and education at ANADP11 (8)

It is no secret that very few of those presently involved in (R&D in) digital preservation have been formally trained to do so. As Meg Phillips of the US National Archives said at the conference: ‘Present staff at cultural heritage institutions have patched it together – they have degrees in the arts or humanities, and what they know of digital preservation they have mostly learned on the job.’ This is no wonder, of course, since DP is a new field and it takes a while for supporting industries such as education and training to catch up. Judging by the presentations of the educational panel this work is still ongoing. Because it does not only involve defining new skills, but also combining those skills with existing skills (library, museum, etc.), fitting all those skills in job descriptions that real-live people can actually fulfill and fitting all those job descriptions into effective work flows and organizational settings. Then develop training programs and curricula that can deliver those people.

Educational panel, from the left: Andreas Rauber (TU  Wien), Sheila Corrall (Univ. of Sheffield), Joy Davidson (UK DCC), George Coulbourne (US LoC)

To make things more complicated, the ‘new’ skills and the ‘old’ skills do not always go well together. As Joy Davidson emphasized, this is where the library meets IT and these two have very different service-mindsets: whereas libraries are about very personal, individual service, IT is about rolling services out to lots of people. Service requires softer skills (communication), whereas IT is more about facts and figures.

And there is more. When asked to define her ‘fantasy staff member’, Meg Phillips of the US National Archives and Records Administration (and one of the few archivists present), said that NARA needs staff with broad knowledge of formats and digital preservation tools, staff who can think, who can help make decisions. Howard Besser of New York University added: ‘We do not need tinkerers; we need people who can deal with the scale of the digital challenge, who can deal with new, emerging problems.’ Some existing staff can be trained new skills, Howard said, but as this is more about mind set than actual skills, we must accept that some of the staff we have will not be able to make the change. It is the younger people, the students, who have the right mind frame.

Students attending the conference: ‘Please continue to invite students to these meetings; it develops our thinking at a strategic level.’

The panel reviewed a number of training and education initiatives (check out the slides here). Joy Davidson said she was happy about the level of international cooperation between the different projects and institutions. Yet there is still a lot of diversity in the language used by stakeholders in the different contexts, which makes it hard to develop cross-disciplinary curricula. It is is continuing to be difficult to determine what is generic about DP (education) and what is specific to the contexts.

Here is the educational panel’s answer to the question “Where do you want to be in five years?”

• foster inter-disciplinary group projects in undergrad and postgrad courses (making use of tools like Planets Testbed and Plato). This could be a quick win
• ability to describe and compare data management courses across international postgraduate research courses
• establishment of frameworks for assessing data management skills and professional development progression paths for skills development for a range of disciplines
• greater practical experience opportunities for students
• greater engagement with professional bodies and industry to cooperate on raising awareness amongst researchers of the need to acquire sound data management skills
• ability to match skills across data curation lifecycle and the various roles
• development of information science courses that complement and bridge the gaps in the data management skills of researchers and information technologists. More real-life examples of data management and curation as it relates to day to day activities on the job
• more induction level data management training for all secondary, undergraduate, postgrad and PhD students.

That is some to-do list! But a crucial one. In the end, even in a technical field such as digital preservation, it is the people that make the difference – between ‘tinkering’ and a truly digital mind-set.

Who pays for the invisible and unglamorous but absolutely necessary? – ANADP11 (7) & ESDI11 Round table

‘Economic sustainability’ is a buzz word in digital preservation. It is about what it costs and who pays. It is about users expecting everything that is online to be freely available while the people who do the actual work of providing preservation and access need to feed their families.

On the eve of their session, the ANADP11 economic panel does not (yet) seem daunted by the fact that they have to deal with difficult questions about money – from the left: Aaron Trehub (Auburn University; Alabama Digital Preservation Network; Neil Grindley (JISC), Bohdana Stoklasová (Czech National Library); Maurizio Lunghi (Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale).

There was an ANADP11 panel about these issues as well as an ‘ESDI Roundtable discussion’ (ESDI = Economic Sustainability of Digital Information) the next day. The latter was organized by Neil Grindley of JISC as a follow-up to earlier work by the US/UK  Blue Ribbon Task Force.

I am going to bring some threads from both meetings together in this post. First of all: in a financial context it is essential that we distinguish digitization (the act of making digital copies) from digital preservation (the act of preserving digital objects). Every time I think we have made this point clear enough, some speaker will mix them up again. So, I begin by citing Bohdana Stoklasová of the small but very active Czech National Library (remember those wonderful young web archivsts at IIPC11!):

‘Digital preservation work is invisible, and therefore it is hard to find funding for it. Digitizing new material is much more appealing to funders, because the benefits are immediately visible.’ (Bohdana Stoklasová)

The conversation that followed was mostly about funding and the sustainability of funding (we need long-term money rather than project money), and less about what digital preservation actually costs (the jury is still out on that, as witnessed by a workshop report from an international cost modelling meeting in The Hague last year).

Neil Grindley from JISC offered the audience some valuable insights into how funders think: ‘When a funder sees a problem, he wants to throw money at it and solve the problem. But some problems are too large and intractible.’ Comparing DP to an asteroid (slide right), the question is where and when to hit the asteroid to disarm it. Timing is very important, as is scale. Laura Campbell (Library of Congress) agreed that this is an important issue that funders have to address: exactly where will funders’ money be most effective in bringing DP costs down? She agreed with Grindley that funders from all over the world need to talk about this and align their efforts so that the money will be used in the most effective way. Grindley’s conclusions merit further discussion:





Grassroots initiatives from the US

Americans tend to have a wonderful way of ‘cutting to the chase’. Aaron Trehub of Auburn University Libraries (photo left) was a case in point:

‘An unofficial definition: Digital preservation is the flipside of digital collection-building. Like most infrastructure, it’s invisible, unglamorous, and absolutely necessary’.

‘DP is necessary because: – things (hurricanes, etc.) happen; – hardware breaks; – software crashes; – files get corrupted (‘bit rot’); – somebody hits the wrong button; – somebody drops something; – burning files to CDs and DVDs isn’t enough; – it costs money to restore lost collections.’

‘One solution: distributed digital preservation (DDP): – multiple copies of digital content; – at geographically dispersed locations; – with at least 75-125 miles between them; – preferably out of hurricane pathways; – and across different power grids'; – with different system administrators; – on live media, with audits for integrity; = and in at least 3 copies (LOCKSS = six copies).’

‘DDP basic ingredients: – institutional commitment; – quorum of at least six institutions; – hardware (LOCKSS boxes), – in-house IT support; governance structure; – enough $$$ to cover membership and/or LOCKSS fees (your institution might already be a member!); – enough ‘sweat equity’ to keep it running.’

Such a DDP set-up works even for a poor state such as Alabame, which established the ‘Alabama Digital Preservation Network’ (or ADPNet), in which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural heritage organizations in Alabana share the work of preservation. The network now holds some 3TB of data and has been self-sustaining since 2008. Here is Aaron Trehub’s assessment of ADPNet’s significance and his economic advice for anyone thinking about doing something similar (and do check out the remainder of Aaron’s slides when they become available through the Educopia event website!):

ESDI11 – Economic Sustainability of Digital Information Roundtable

On Thursday, a selection of ANADP11 attendees defied increasing bouts of conference fatigue and gathered to meet with some extremely early risers across the ocean who attended via Skype (also see the tweet threat on #ESDI11 with excellent work by cardcc). Neil Grindley explained that a mini-taskforce consisting of Chris Rusbridge (present LinkedIn profile: ‘retired’ at ‘None’) and Brian Lavoie is following up the work done earlier by the Blue Ribbon Task Force, by trying to turn their 100+ page report ‘Sustainable economics for a digital planet’ into a ‘reference model’, a tool that can help us understand the economic issues and the dynamics of sustainability, provide us with a joint vocabulary, and help us make the case vis-à-vis funders and the public at large. In that sense the model is to work much like the OAIS model did for technical issues – although Chris Rusbridge was quick to add that he does not like the OAIS model much (‘In reality digital archiving is a much more fluid and continuing activity than the closed box idea that is at the centre of OAIS’).

But first a few words on the BRTF work. Sabine Schrimpf of the NCDD’s German colleagues, nestor, reported from the nestor working group which studied the relevance of the report for Germany (Report in German. The working group agreed with many of the Task Force’s findings, but was ‘reluctant’ to accept the report’s recommendations for more public-private partnerships (PPP’s). I felt much the same way when I read the report – the US economy’s dynamics are different from much that goes on in Europe. We accept much more readily that preservation is a public duty and should be funded accordingly. (But note Clifford Lynch’s assessment of PPP’s: ‘Mostly, when there are profits, they go to private partners; if there are losses, they to to the public sector.’)

About the reference model: Chris Rusbridge (at right, with Brian Lavoie standing by via Skype, see cable mess above) stressed that the present text is very, very draft (see slides forthcoming on JISC website), but what I saw from it looks promising. It charts all those roles and relationships that make the digital world so different from the analogue world. E.g., what are the properties of sustainability? We do a lot of the work for ‘future users’, but they have no voice yet, so who can function as their ‘current representatives’? Who benefits, who pays; what about free riders? Where do rights holders come in? Etc. (‘Nobody wants preservation; everybody wants the digital asset.’ Chris Rusbridge)

The slides are very much worth reading – all of them will be made available through the JISC website, but here is a taste for you (thanks, Chris, for making these available to me on Sunday afternoon!)

Wouter Schallier of LIBER (the European Association of Research Libraries) reviewed the work that LIBER is doing to make the case for digital information, focussing on the (access) project Europeana, where digital content from all the EU member states is being made available. As an access project, Europeana is presently sustainable, but the future is uncertain. What will happen to Europeana if one of the major aggregators stops doing the work? Off the record doubts could be registered as well as to the added value of Europeana in comparison to Google. Is the Europeana system user-friendly enough?

Matthew Loy and Nancy Maron from Ithaka joined the conference by Skype to report on the sustainability research they did for JISC a couple of years ago, with a number of cases studies (full documentation here). Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information, CNI) commented that in his view the case studies are not classical digital preservation sustainability situations.

In the end, everybody agreed that the work Rusbridge and Lavoie are doing on the ESRM can definitely have value for the community, especially in the difficult task of Making the Case vis-à-vis funders and the public at large. But it is complicated business that Lavoie & Rusbridge are trying to chart, and a possible pitfall is that people will start using it as a standard (‘we are ESRM-compliant’). And there is need for a community to support the work and test it. Sabine Schrimpf suggested the nestor working group, but more testing is obviously needed.

Chris Rusbridge (furiously tweeting) and Clifford Lynch (CNI).

Clifford Lynch commented at some time during the meeting that ‘the BRTF report is cited a lot, but I am not sure how well it has been read.’ Matthew Woollard drew attention to the option strategies mentioned in the report. As we do not know what future demand will be for what we are presently curating, the way to save money might be to invest a little money into preservation work now, for say five years, and then decide later what selection from the material merits expensive curation measures. Clifford Lynch added that this strategy is being promoted by the US National Science Foundation as well, as short-term options tend to be cheap.

I leave you with Neil Grindley’s key words from the meeting. To be continued, absolutely.