Reflections on the digital curation landscape

Readers of Pipeline and attendees at IDCC26 will be aware that I have now stepped down as Director of the DCC after more than 16 years that have been eventful and rewarding in equal measure. Colleagues have invited me to reflect on what's changed in the world of digital curation during that time. What follows is a personal perspective that's certainly incomplete, probably biased but I hope broadly accurate.

I'll focus on changes to the broader landscape but begin by noting the changes to the DCC itself. The organisation I took on in 2010 was defined almost entirely by a single stream of UK funding which defined its work programme and the UK focus of its work. Its staff were almost all British, but 6 years after the DCC had begun there was significant international interest in its work. The DCC that exists today is more varied in every respect: in its funding sources (a mixture of subscription services, paid training, consultancy, events and European and UK grant-funded projects); its activities; the number of countries it has worked in; and in the diversity of its staff.

What's also changed dramatically is the ability of institutions to effectively manage data created in research (and to a lesser extent, that consumed by research) as well as the number of countries in which this is true. In 2011, the DCC's institutional engagement programme was created to take examples and good practice from the handful of UK universities that had already built up research data services to support others to do the same, whether that be through policy development, creating service definitions or recruiting staff. Although no one would claim these services are perfect today, they exist in some form in every research-active UK university. The set of countries where this is true has changed markedly. There were areas of excellence back in 2010 that have maintained their lead, such as the Netherlands and Australia. In my first week as DCC Director in 2010 I attended the launch of the 3TU (now 4TU) data repository in Delft. Along with DANS in the Hague they have continued to provide examples of practice and technology we can all learn from. More recently backing from a national funder, NWO, for open science activity and infrastructure has helped the Netherlands sustain and build on this early lead. The same has been true in Australia, through the coordination and infrastructure provided by ARDC and its predecessors such as ANDS. 

National and regional funding initiatives have created institutional capability and national digital research infrastructure in many other countries during this time; others have been the result of collaborative activity between universities and other research organisations. Many of these national initiatives have made rapid progress and surpassed what has been achieved in the UK. There are too many to list individually; those we've had some contact or involvement with include NFDI in Germany, The Alliance in Canada, EOSC in Europe and the consortium behind DMPTuuli, as well as examples in Portugal, Latvia, Singapore, Malaysia, Austria, Switzerland, South Korea and Japan.

One change about which I feel less positive is the increased presence of corporate systems in institutional digital research services. It's not that I object to the commercial provision of such services; DMPonline would not survive for long if I did. But I do see two, related problems emerging. One is that some providers are not satisfied with selling one component such as a research information management system or a data repository; they want you to buy an entire suite of services from them which are interlocked and interdependent in ways which will make it difficult, if not impossible, to replace any one component in future. This is what's often referred to as vendor lock-in and it's something that, early in my career, IT procurements were designed to avoid (admittedly with varying degrees of success.) Procurements in universities are now often driven by procurement specialists rather than IT procurement specialists, and this can also mean that a full options appraisal isn't really done; there's an assumption that something will be bought in. Imagine, by analogy, that you are making a decision on how to have dinner tonight. You could cook for yourself; you could go to a restaurant; you could visit a takeaway and bring something home; or you could opt for minimum effort and have a meal delivered to you. A procurement approach often feels as if the 'cook for yourself' option is ruled out before we begin. Some try to level the playing field by offering commercial services built on open solutions (such as Atmire, 4Science, CoSector and ourselves.) Organisations such as Invest In Open also work hard to promote and sustain open solutions and we explored these issues with them and Geant in a series of online events in late 2020:

A significant and positive change has been the creation of RDA in 2013, an organisation of which we were a founder member and which continues to be of value to us. It's allowed us to easily bring together international groups to work on the development of standards. It's also allowed us not simply to sustain, but to completely let go of things like our metadata standards directory, confident that an international group would not just sustain it but develop and grow it beyond anything we could have done alone. I've said at times that if the RDA did not exist, we would have had to invent it. The flaw with that statement is that we would not have had the wit or influence to do so. I'm very glad that others did.

On a more whimsical note, the potential to confuse the DCC with similarly-titled organisations has certainly increased. I'm sure they existed in 2010 but we weren't as aware of them. You're unlike to confuse us with DCC Energy, the solar panel installers. It was unfortunate that the Netherlands chose the acronym for their Digital Competence Centres, but I think we have now resolved that potential confusion. The DCC that now eclipse us (in Google-fu at least) are the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders who, whilst they also pursue excellence, do so in a very different field of activity.

One thing that has remained constant and I am sure will continue to do so is the community spirit that exists in the field and the willingness of everyone involved to offer their knowledge and support to help others do better. It has made my time at the DCC a pleasure and a privilege.