Policies, Strategies and Guidelines

We’ve seen suggestions in comments on this blog, and on other blogs, that code is better than specifications as representation information, and that well-used, running open source code is better than proprietary code.

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I’m just on my way back from Wigan, having given a presentation this afternoon on the role of the records manager in digital preservation to a group of, you’ve guessed it, records managers. I was really encouraged to see that the group had decided to dedicate their entire meeting today to tackling the thorny issue of digital preservation.

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Dave Thompson, Digital Curator at the Wellcome Library asked a question on the Digital Preservation list (which is not well set up for discussion just now). I've replied, but we agreed I would adapt my reply for the blog for any further discussion that might emerge."I'm looking for arguments for and against when, and if, digital material should be normalised. I'm thinking about the long term management of textual material in proprietary formats such as MS Word. I see three basic approaches on which I'm seeking the lists comments and thoughts.

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Pre-conference workshops can be very useful and interesting; they can be a good part of the justification for attending a conference, giving an extended opportunity to focus on a single topic, followed by a broader (but shallower) look at many topics, at the conference itself. This time it is quite frustrating, as I would very much like to go to all the workshops! There is still time to register for your choice, and for the IDCC conference itself.

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Just to note a post by Jeremy Frumkin from Arizona, who like me was in the Organisation breakout, and another by Maurice Vanderfeesten from the SURFfoundation, who was in the Identifiers workshop, and gives a very clear summary of what resulted there.

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Are institutional repositories set up and resourced to preserve their contents over the long term? Potentially contradictory evidence has emerged from my various questions related to this topic.

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Merrilee on the hangingtogether blog, with a catchup post about the fall CNI meeting, drew our attention to a presentation by Susan Gibbons of Rochester, on studying next generation academics (ie graduate students), as preparation for enhancements to their repository system, ir-plus.

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Fresh from a fascinating day in Sheffield, organised by the DCC and the White Rose e-Science folk. Objectives for the day included building closer relationships between White Rose and DCC, helping us learn more about their approach to e-Science, identify data issues, and influence the DCC agenda!

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Dr Alex Cook from the Australian Research Council (a money man! Important!) talking on the Excellence in Research Framework (ERA), the Access Framework and ASHER. ERA appears to be like the UK’s erstwhile RAE, and will use existing HE Research Data Collection rules for publication and research income information where possible. 8 clusters of disciplines have been identified. Currently looking at the bibliometric and other indicators which will be discipline-specific (principles, methodologies and a matrix showing which are used where).

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This is perhaps the last of my posts resulting from conversations and presentations at the UK e-Science All Hands meeting in Edinburgh. This one relates to Andrew Treloar’s presentation on the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), and its over-arching programme, Platforms for Collaboration, part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

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Cameron Neylon wrote a nice post indirectly addressing the question of how Nature might make Connotea more useful. It's well worth reading for its own merits, but I was so taken by his questions, I thought they might be re-purposed to apply to repositories. As Cameron says "These are framed around the idea of reference management but the principles I think are sufficiently general to apply to most web services".

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As I mentioned in the previous post, there has been some discussion in the JISC Repositories task force about the relationship between repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). Stuart Lewis asserted, for example, that “Examples of well-populated repositories such as TCD (Dublin) and Imperial College are backed by CRISs.” So it seems worth while to look at the CRIS with repositories in mind.

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I only managed the first couple of hours of the Edinburgh Repository Fringe event [two days ago... but Google went bonkers and decided this was a spam blog meanwhile!] but it was already great fun, and I can see that those who stay the course will have a great time, and learn heaps. Note to self: more conferences should be like this!

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I promised to be more specific about what I would like to see in repositories that presented more value for less work overall, by offering facilities that allow it to become part of the researcher’s workflow. I’m going to refer to this as “the Research Repository System (RRS)” for convenience.

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Robin Rice passed on this announcement about Edinburgh's newest festival, the Repository Fringe. She writes: "the event is being jointly planned by Edinburgh and Southampton to coincide with the 'preview week' before the opening of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the spirit of the Fringe, it's a kind of an 'unconference' and we're encouraging people to sign up to participate in various ways on the wiki, e.g.

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I was very pleased with reactions to the Negative Click Repositories post. I’ll come back to the idea itself in a later post, but this just attempts to gather some of the comments together (the first few are comments to the original post, but I know my blogreader doesn’t expose those easily).

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I'm really quite taken by the SNEEP plug-in for ePrints that was showcased at OR08. It enables users to add their comments/annotations to an item stored in an eprints repository. These annotations are then made public and items can have numerous annotations added by different users. I don't know if there's a limit...? This is a great example of one way that value can be added to data collections in the context of digital curation - though admittedly the value of the added comments and annotations will be debatable!

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The OpenDOAR and ROAR services both present self-reported claims by repositories across the world about their contents, backed up by some harvested facts. I’m interested in those UK repositories that claim to hold data.

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In a post last year, Peter Murray Rust criticised DSpace as a place to keep data:"The search engines locate content. Try searching for NSC383501 (the entry for a molecule from the NCI) and you’ll find: DSpace at Cambridge: NSC383501"But the actual data itself (some of which is textual metadata) is not accessible to search engines so isn’t indexed. So if you know how to look for it through the ID, fine. If you don’t you won’t. [...]

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The other day I had an interesting discussion with a group of IT facilities management guys here at Edinburgh, who have been asked to write the requirements for a new version of their Archive Service, capable of handling modern requirements for huge amounts of data. It was an interesting discussion, and I hope to remain involved in what they are planning (which is a long way from getting funded, I guess).

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There's a concept in maths called "closed but unbounded". I'm not sure it's exactly to the point (I hope that's a pun), but "subjects" seem a bit like that. You can be pretty sure about most of the stuff that's not in a subject (or "domain"), and most of the stuff that is in it, but you can be very puzzled about some of the edges, and can find yourself in some extremely surprising discussions at times about parts of subjects that challenge most of the ideas you had. So subjects turn out to be very un-bounded.

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This is a rather late posting about day 2 of the JISC Repositories Conference, a week or so ago now. I mainly attended the data-oriented stream. I was very interested in the presentations from the StORe and CLADDIER projects, both of which touched on data citation. They go about this in different ways.

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