New project and end of this blog

I am glad to announce that the activities carried out through the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project are now being continued through a project called Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) funded by JISC under the Information Environment Programme 2009-11.

Therefore, this is now the official final post for this blog. I would like to thank to everyone that has been reading and contributing to it and hope you will continue to follow our work in this new venture. 

A new EIDCSR project blog has been set up. Please follow our new activities there!

IASSIST Quarterly on research data repositories

IASSIST Quarterly IQ Vol. 31 issue 3&4 is now available. This IQ is a special issue dedicated to explore different research data repositories projects. The editor, Gretchen Cano, highlights the common themes such as the importance of aligning services with researchers' needs or the role of the data manager playing an increasingly important role within research groups. 

And it contains an article by me : Digital Repository Services for Managing Research Data: What Do Oxford Researchers Need?  where I describe the findings of the requirements gathering exercise with researchers in Oxford.

Digital Preservation Animations

Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) has just released the following great video in youtube explaining digital preservation in a funny and simple way. Good job!

 

Report on the Digital Repositories Workshop in Oxford

On Thursday 23 April, the Digital Repositories Workshop was held successfully at the Oxford e-Research Centre. It represented a bridge between the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project and the recently JISC funded, and soon to be unveiled, Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research (EIDCSR) project.

The workshop brought 37 delegates from a variety of colleges and departments in Oxford. The morning was dedicated to showcasing repository activities in the University. After this a technical session was held in the afternoon and this included a group task to address the following question:

"from your experience, what are the technical components required to manage and curate research data in Oxford, why and what developments are more urgent?"

A full report of the event as well as copies of the presentations can be found at:

http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/Workshops-Repositories.xml

Consultation with Service Units in Oxford

I have just published the last report of the Oxford scoping study,  "Research Data Management Services: Findings of the Consultation with Service Providers" . 

This document reports back from a consultation with service units in Oxford aimed to validate the researchers requirements for services gathered through the scoping study interviews as well as to determine the data management services available to researchers and plans for future ones. The report also includes the the two main recommendations produced by the Oxford Digital Repositories Steering Group after considering an earlier version of the document.

Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure

An internal event, the Digital Repositories Workshop: Tools and Infrastructure,  organised under the auspices of the Oxford Digital Repositories Steering Group will take place on Thursday 23 April.

This workshop aims to provide an overall view of best practice in the deployment and use of digital repositories to manage digital content in Oxford. The event is only open to Members of the University of Oxford and Colleges. 

To register please email: Julia.Bremble@oerc.ox.ac.uk

Using the DAF Methodology in Oxford

The document "Using the Data Audit Framework: An Oxford Case Study" reporting on the Oxford experience applying the DAF Methodology has now been published as a deliverable of the JISC funded DISC-UK DataShare project.

The DAF Methodology proved to be an excellent complement to the interview framework used to gather researchers' requirements for services to help them manage their data as part of the Scoping Digital Repository Services for

 Research Data Management project. 

In the Oxford DAF two research groups participated in the exercise mainly through their Data Managers who provided incredibly valuable information about their groups' data and data management practices.  In both cases, their practices where mapped, see example below, to the DCC Lifecycle Model which we felt it needed to be integrated with the DAF Methodology.

In addition to this, the DAF data assets register was used to compile information about data resources being made available through the Oxford website.

We have had a really good experience with the DAF Methodology here in Oxford and will certainly make use of it in the future.

The UKRDS Final Report

I have just discovered that the executive summary of the UKRDS Final Report has been published on their website. This summary reports an overall estimated savings delivered by a scale-up UKRDS service over a period of five years to be the financial equivalent of 63.5 FTEs . 

The report also offers the following 2 key recommendations:

1.     That a UKRDS is feasible and should be considered for funding over a period of at least 5 years;

2.     That in the first instance a 2-year Pathfinder phase should be funded at a cost of £5.31m.

The International Conference on the UKRDS tomorrow will certainly be a worthwhile and highly stimulating event.  

A new Oxford project: BRII

The Building the Research Information Infrastructure (BRII) is an innovative JISC funded project led by Sally Rumsey and Anne Bowtel that will make use of semantic web technologies to harvest data about research activity from existing sources in Oxford to re-use them in novel ways as well as to make them available to others. 

The data about research activity is also known as research management data (not research data!). Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin, BRII Project Analyst, explains very effectively what these data are in her recent blog post. The BRII team will use existing data sources like the Oxford Research Archive or the Medical Science Division website, organize the data using RDF ontologies/taxonomies and develop APIs and web services that can enable the re-use of the data for other purposes.

   

Linking information like this about researchers' fields of expertise, projects, publications, roles, groups, collaborators, etc  has the the potential to impact how scholars identify their peers in particular areas and could empower them to establish new multi-disciplinary relationships which in some cases may help attract funding.

I see this project having strong synergies with research data management activities. In a way, research data outputs could be one of the pieces of information that could be linked to their authors, disciplines and publications, improving discoverability as well as providing additional information about the data. Moreover, the interviews I conducted as part of the scoping study revealed researchers' interest to identify who else in the institution handles the same types of data so that they could benefit from their experiences. Therefore, this type of research information infrastructure could help promoting best practice in research data management. One could also foresee, service providers making their existing services explicit in a similar form so that researchers can discover them more easily but this is certainly not within the scope of this project.    

In sum, this is an extremely exciting new initiative and I would highly recommend to keep an eye on the project's blog that will surely produce some stimulating material.

Economics of Digital Preservation

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access published in December 2008 the report "Sustaining the Digital Investment: Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation". 

This Task Force made up of international leading experts in digital preservation and curation has been brought together to investigate issues around the economic sustainability of digital information. This first report presents a conceptual framework that will guide the Task Force efforts in 2009. 

A definition is provided for economically sustainable digital preservation: 

“set of business, social, technological, and policy mechanisms that encourage the gathering of important information assets into digital preservation systems, and support the indefinite persistence of digital preservation systems, enabling access to and use of the information assets into the long-term future.” 

And a set of requirements to achieve this are proposed: 

•  Recognition of the benefits of preservation on the part of key decision-makers;
•  Incentives for decision-makers to act in the public interest;
•  A process for selecting digital materials for long-term retention;
•  Mechanisms to secure an ongoing, efficient allocation of resources to digital preservation activities;
•  Appropriate organization and governance of digital preservation activities. 

The report goes into defining business and economic models explaining how "the economic model describes how economic reality works and the business models provide templates for acting within that reality". Consequently, the Task Force suggests that good business models will rely on complete economic models and they propose a minimum set of properties for the latter: 

• They will account for the resources used to produce sustainability and access.
• They will pay special attention to the role of time, in both the simple sense of the elapsed time that leads to bit rot, and in the more complicated sense that over time ownership of the data and available technologies may change.
• They will enable us to examine the effects of different organizational and technical strategies on the quality of preservation and access.
• They will enable us to assess the technical and the economic risks of losing data.
• They will allow us to evaluate alternative policies, including changes in intellectual property law.
• They will allow us to evaluate the implications of the five components of our sustainability definition, both individually and collectively. 

After this, a synthesis of a review of the literature on economics of digital preservation is provided and two UK projects are examined: 

• The LIFE Project, a British Library and UCL collaboration which generated the lifecycle preservation model shown below that helps establishing the cost to preserve digital materials. 

Figure 1. LIFE’s preservation model (taken from Blue Ribbon Task Force report) 

• The Keeping Research Data Safe study that focused on developing guidance to enable UK HE institutions to develop cost models to manage and preserve research data. The cost framework suggested by the study consisted of three parts:
• key cost variables and units that affect the cost of preservation
• an activity model that identifies activities with cost implications
• a resources template providing a framework to draw the previous elements together 

The report finishes with six lessons learned: 

1. It is easier to ‘sell’ outcomes than processes.
2. Avoid excessive discounting of the benefits from digital preservation
3. Separating preservation costs from other costs is difficult
4. Diversity of funding streams is important for sustainable digital preservation
5. Non-monetary incentives are important.
6. Consider the full range of options when selecting an economic model to support digital preservation. 

Overall, this interim report provides an extremely useful synthesis of the issues around the economics of digital preservation for those organizations that are considering taking up the challenge. The next report promises to offer a set of scenarios with common conditions and associated suitable economic models for supporting long-term digital preservation.

Research Data Management and Curation Services Framework

In the last months we have been conducting a consultation with service units in Oxford to validate the requirements gathered through the researchers interviews as well as to define what data management services are on offer and where the gaps in service provision are.

Researchers' top requirements for services were:

• Advice on practical issues related to managing data across their life cycle. 
  
• A secure and user-friendly solution that allows storage of large volume of data and sharing of these in a controlled fashion way allowing fine-grained access control mechanisms.
  
• A sustainable infrastructure that allows publication and long-term preservation of research data for those disciplines not currently served by domain specific services such as the UK Data Archive, NERC Data Centres, European Bioinformatics Institute and others.

Those requirements helped to produce the following framework of research data management services :

Data Management and Sharing Plans	Support and advice to help researchers prepare their data management and sharing plans.
Legal and Ethical	This service includes support to assist researchers with t he legal and ethical implications of creating, sharing and using data.
Best Formats and Best Practice	Support for researchers to decide which are the best formats and practice for producing and documenting specific data. This service may also include provision of support for database design.
Secure Storage	Secure storage includes infrastructure that allows storing research data providing backup and version control capabilities amongst other things.
Metadata	Tools and support to permit researchers describe their data from the moment of creation
Access and Discovery	A support service as well as tools to help researchers locate and access research data. This service could also include tools to help research groups to find about their data resources using the Data Audit Framework methodology.
Computation, Analysis & Visualization	Software and computing resources that allow analysis and visualization of research data as well as the training needed to equip researchers with the appropriate skills.
Restricted Sharing	Technical infrastructure to share research data with selected individuals or groups.
Data Cleaning	Support to clean and prepare data to the standard required for publication. This service should include help with anonymizing data.
Publication	Infrastructure that permits researchers to publish documented data and link them to research articles and other materials located in other repositories. In some cases researchers may want to exploit their data commercially. DRAMBORA could serve as a tool here to assess repositories that publish the data.
Assess Value	One of the main challenges with research data is deciding what data needs to be kept and for how long.
Preservation	This service would be responsible for looking after the data in the long-term applying the required measures so that the data is accessible through time.
Add Value	Once the data is stored with the metadata associated with it, value can be added by organizing similar data in groups, promoting it, linking it to other materials or allowing annotations.

In order to validate this framework we mapped it to the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model, see below: 

Mapping between DCC Curation Lifecycle and Research Data Management Services
DCC Lifecycle Model Sequential Actions	Research Data Management Services	Description
Conceptualise	Data Management/ Sharing Plans; Best Formats and Best Practice; Legal and Ethical	This stage is related to services to support researchers in the production of data management and data sharing plans. It is also related to the advisory services for best formats and best practice for data creation as well as legal and ethical services for data creation (for instance to clearly define the ownership of the data to be created or how can they be used) and sharing.
Create or receive	Best Format and Best Practice; Metadata	At this point researchers need support to figure out best formats and best practice as well how to best document their data with appropriate metadata.
Appraise and select/ dispose	Assess Value	This phase relates to services to assess value of the data.
Ingest	Data Cleaning, Add Value	Before data are ingested, they will need to be prepared and cleaned. During ingestion other information can be added to enhance them.
Preservation Action	Preservation	Obviously relates to preservation services.
Store	Secure Storage	This stage clearly relates to the secure storage.
Access, Use and Reuse	Publication; Legal and Ethical; Computation, Analysis and Visualization	This phase relates to several of the research data management services. Publication of data as well as access and discovery belong to this stage.  When publishing data there is a legal aspect that needs to be addressed and hence the relation here to legal services. In addition to this, the use and reuse of data is tightly coupled to analysis and computational services.
Transform	Computation, Analysis and Visualization; Preservation	Transforming the data relates to producing new derived version of them by either analysis, visualization or for preservation purposes.

And now we are using this framework to establish the levels of service provided for each of the services in the framework in order to identify those that need to be develop further. 

A bright future for research libraries

The Research Information Network (RIN) has just published "Ensuring a bright future for research libraries", a guide aimed at vice-chancellors and senior institutional managers to ensure that library and information services evolve in tune with researchers' needs. I participated as a member of the working group and it turned out to be a rather interesting and useful exercise.

The guide provides a framework of issues that need to be considered when developing library and information services. One of the framework headings curation, preservation and disposal includes a section on research data:

"cooperate with research funders, others institutions and specialist agencies in developing a coherent and comprehensive framework of services to ensure that valuable research data are managed effectively from the point of creation, preserved and made accessible to others."

A selection of good practice examples are also offered and the LSE Data Library features there as a research support service that establishes close connections between library and researchers.

Datasets Seminar in Madrid

On Monday I will be participating in a seminar organized to discuss the issues around the inclusion of data in digital repositories. The event has been organized by the Consorcio Madroño, a consortium of universities in Madrid with the aim of fostering inter-library collaboration. The seminar will also bring Alicia Medina from UNED, Stuart Macdonald from the University of Edinburgh and Dr. Celia Russsell from Manchester University.

I have been told that the presentations will be filmed and made available on the web. As soon I know where I will post it here. 

 

Institutional and National Research Data Management Services

Last week the second event organized as part of the Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management project took place at the Said Business School. The aim was to hear about examples of services to support researchers with their data management duties and encourage discussion amongst service units in Oxford. We had a great group of speakers coming from: 

• San Diego Super Computer Data Central, 
  
• the UK Research Data Service, 
  
• the Digital Curation Centre, 
  
• the UK Data Archive, 
  
• the NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre, 
  
• the Archaeology Data Service and 
  
• Oxford Legal Services. 

Throughout the day a wide range of services were described including infrastructure and tools for storage, access, discovery, use or preservation as well as services related to support, advice and training starting as early as possible in the research lifecycle.  The final panel discussion between some of the service units in Oxford evidenced the need for coordination and funding to provide the range of support services that Oxford researchers need. 

The presentations are now available at: http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/Workshops-DataServices.xml