digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

There was a 6 minute interview on digital preservation and personal digital archives on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme at 8.21 am UK time this morning with Richard Ovenden (chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition), John Sutherland of UCL, and John Humphries of the BBC. The discussion did feel a bit weak in places and the researcher input to the discussion perhaps could have been balanced with input from someone active in the digital humanities but it was still interesting to hear and the digital library/archive case is well put by Richard Ovenden. You can now listen to a recording of the discussion online.

The official description of the broadcast is as follows: The poet Wendy Cope has sold her archive to the British Library for £32,000, a bounty that includes everything from letters, diaries and drafts to more than 40,000 emails.John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, and Richard Ovenden, of the Bodleian Library, consider whether emails really denote a digital form of art, and what impact the email will have for future literary research.

Projects from the JISC Managing Research Data Programme were involved in a Parallel Session at the annual JISC Conference on Tuesday this week.

Entitled ‘The benefits of more effective research data management in UK Universities’, the session explained how projects have been developing ’Benefits Case Studies’  with support from Charles Beagrie Ltd to provide evidence of the positive effects of improvements which they have engineered.  The case studies provide significant indications of improved research efficiency through more effective research data management.  The case studies will be synthesised in a report by Neil Beagrie due for release in May.

Presentations from the parallel session are available online at:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2011/03/jisc11/programme/1researchdata.aspx

They are best perused in the following order:

Simon Hodson, JISCMRD, Introduction
Neil Beagrie, Cost-Benefits and Business Cases Support Role
Manjula Patel and Neil Beagrie, I2S2 Project, UKOLN, University of Bath
June Finch, MaDAM Project, University of Manchester
Jonathan Tedds, HALOGEN Project, University of Leicester

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new project focussing on development of a digital preservation benefits analysis toolset.

The “Digital Preservation Benefit Analysis Tools” project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and will run from 1st February to 31 July 2011.

The project  aims to test, review and promote combined use of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) Benefits Taxonomy and the Value Chain and Impact Analysis tool first applied in the I2S2 project  for assessing the benefits and impact of digital preservation of research data. We will extend their utility to and adoption within the JISC community by providing user review and guidance for the tools and creating an integrated toolset. The project consortium consists of a mix of user institutions, projects, and disciplinary data services committed to the testing and exploitation of these tools and the lead partners in their original creation. We will demonstrate and critique the tools, and then create and disseminate the toolset and accompanying materials such as User Guides and Factsheets to the wider community.

A project website is at http://beagrie.com/krds-i2s2.php and the project plan and project outputs will be available from the website in due course. A dissemination event to mark the conclusion of the project will be held in central London on 12 July 2011 (further details and registration will be announced in May).

The project partners are UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Bath, the Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education (CHIME) at University College London , the UK Data Archive (University of Essex), the Archaeology Data Service(University of York),  OCLC Research, and  Charles Beagrie Limited.