The first paper was mine; naturally, I’m not going to blog it. But I’ll post a link to a PDF version of my talk here, and will Tweet it too. Stay tuned.
Archive for the ‘institutional policies’ Category
DH09 Thursday, session 1: libraries!
Thursday, June 25th, 2009DH09: ACH general meeting
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009The Association for Computers and the Humanities wants YOU to be a member. You get an OUP journal subscription out of it! And ACH, one of the organizations putting on this conference, is funded by its membership dues. Do it, folks.
Stefan Sinclair, chair of the ACH jobs effort, is putting on a jobs slam! Like speed-dating, but different. Job seekers are going to spend 30 seconds each presenting themselves, and perhaps they’ll get hooked up with jobs. But first, job opportunities:
Elsevier gets sneaky
Friday, June 19th, 2009The large and influential academic publisher Elsevier seems to have quietly changed its publication agreement. From the sample agreement [PDF link]:
Assignment of publishing rights
I hereby assign to <Copyright owner> the copyright in the manuscript identified above (government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign a non-exclusive licence) and any supplemental tables, illustrations or other information submitted therewith that are intended for publication as part of or as a supplement to the manuscript (the “Article”) in all forms and media (whether now known or hereafter developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of copyright, effective when and if the article is accepted for publication. This transfer includes the right to provide the Article in electronic and online forms and systems. No revisions, additional terms or addenda to this Agreement can be accepted without our express written consent. Authors at institutions that place restrictions on copyright assignments, including those that do so due to policies about local institutional repositories, are encouraged to obtain a waiver from those institutions so that the author can accept our publishing agreement. (Emphasis mine.)
So, first they imply that institutions with institutional repositories restrict their faculty’s publishing opportunities by placing “restrictions on copyright assignments.” Not true: most institutions aim to educate their faculty about copyright and make sure that their researchers don’t sign away all rights in perpetuity without knowing exactly what they’re doing. It’s understandable that Elsevier wouldn’t like this, as they want exclusive copyright on work they didn’t perform (though, to be fair, are publishing).
Then Elsevier encourages authors to opt out of an enterprise that is proving to be a significant boon to academics (first and foremost providing them with visibility), implying that this is required for the authors to accept Elsevier’s apparently immutable publishing agreement. No contract is immutable before it is signed, but the language here does strongly suggest this, counting on most people just going along with it because they are unaware, or because they want to publish and don’t have time to pursue this with Elsevier.
It’s true that the very next paragraph, and its continuation later in the document, have different implications:
Retention of Rights for Scholarly Purposes (see Definitions below)
I understand that I retain or am hereby granted (without the need to obtain further permission) rights to use certain versions of the Article for certain scholarly purposes, as described and defined below (“Retained Rights”), and that no rights in patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights are transferred to the journal.The Retained Rights include the right to use the Pre-print or Accepted Authors Manuscript for Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and for Scholarly Posting; and the Published Journal Article for Personal Use and Internal Institutional Use. [...]
[definition of scholarly posting] Voluntary posting by an author on open Web sites operated by the author or the author’s institution for scholarly purposes, or (in connection with Pre-prints) pre-print servers, provided there is no Commercial Purpose involved. Deposit in or posting to Special Repositories (such as PubMed Central) is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository and only consistent with Elsevier’s policies concerning such repositories. If the author wishes to refer to the journal in connection with such posting, the Appropriate Bibliographic Citation should be used.
Further confusing: a scholar may post pre-prints to the websites that fit the italicized definition above, which would seem to include institutional repositories. Except Elsevier mentions repositories twice, and both in a permission-denied context: the second one is the Special Repositories such as PubMed.
Seems like language designed to mislead and bully, to me. Elsevier, would you please clarify?
MLA: print no longer default medium
Friday, March 20th, 2009In case more evidence was needed that scholarly work created in media other than print is, well, scholarly work, MLA makes a statement (as reported by Inside Higher Ed):
Even in citations, print is the default no more. The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, released Tuesday, states that the Modern Language Association no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry. Moreover, the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise.[...]
The latest edition of the standard style guide for language and literary study is thinner than the last (and considerably less shiny) – thinner because it is the first to be complemented by a Web component. The password-protected Web site includes the full (and searchable) text of the handbook, plus 200 online-only examples, and a series of 30-plus-step narratives taking undergraduates through the process of writing a paper, complete with model papers available in PDF form and professors’ sample comments.
The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, six years in the making, is available for purchase here.
BU OA: reactions so far
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Well! The news of BU’s adoption of an open access plan has spread far and wide. It’s been picked up by DigitalKoans, by the Associated Press, and by Inside Higher Ed among others. Peter Suber’s thoughtful response was one of the first, supplemented by further thoughts after the university published the document approved by the Faculty Council last September.
Institutional repository manager and librarian Dorothea Salo (University of Wisconsin) wrote an interesting post in which she characterizes BU’s initiative as something hybrid compared to what’s gone before. She writes:
It is not a mandate of any kind. It is not a typical rights-retention resolution, either; there is no author addendum attached. Instead, it is a fascinating middle-ground. It mentions gold as well as green OA. It mentions building a faculty publications database, not just an IR; this is important because like it or not, faculty publications databases have real-world uses for faculty and administrators that IRs simply don’t. It takes on tenure and promotion practices straightforwardly.
It is, in short, a start toward a university-wide open-access strategy. That’s fascinating, and to the best of my knowledge, completely novel. The breadth of the conversation is certainly a vast improvement over the library starting an IR all by itself that it then doesn’t promote or work to fill. It’s also an improvement over putting all the local open-access eggs in one basket, whether that basket is an IR or an author’s addendum or a gold-fee fund. Several open-access strategies are still in experimental stages… I think it makes an awful lot of sense to keep one’s implementation options open, focusing on policy and hearts-and-minds instead. [emphasis author's]
Salo’s comments seem to me partly descriptive, partly suggestive of where we might want to place emphasis as we work on making this thing a reality. Certainly worth discussing, as I’m sure we will.
BU’s OA document
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009Here (PDF) is the document that describes BU’s current thinking on open access, and what we’re doing about it. Linked here is the version approved by the Faculty Council last September. We welcome and invite constructive feedback on this work in progress.
(Please note: I personally am involved in this project, but am acting more or less as the messenger. I will be unlikely to answer specific questions having to do with policy; other people monitoring this post, however, may be more useful. We’ll be discussing whatever comments we receive amongst ourselves, so if there is no overt reply, please be assured that your input is not only valuable but actively being included in the process.)
BU takes step toward open access
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009We’re go! University Council Approves Open Access Plan, BU Today, 17 Feb 2009:
Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit. [...]
“This vote sends a very strong message of support for open and free exchange of scholarly work,” says [University Librarian Robert] Hudson. “Open access means that the results of research and scholarship can be made open and freely accessible to anyone. It really has increased the potential to showcase the research and scholarship of the University in ways that have not been evident to people.”
Of course, we’ll need to be implementing this, which is no trivial matter—just ask Dorothea Salo and the many, many other institutional repository managers out there. And BU is very aware of this:
“Open access will really highlight the tremendous productivity of our faculty,” says [MED professor of medicine Barbara] Millen. “Among the more important things needed to make it work is a collaboration between the libraries and our faculty to get their research onto the Web. It’s not an inconsequential task.”
Yep, they sure know it’s going to take a large amount of resources—and it looks like the university is willing to put in the effort to do this right. It’s a fantastic thing to be part of.
Any repository folk who happen to read this, please share your wisdom and the appropriate warnings. It’ll be a long (exciting!) haul.
Digital humanities in the news
Monday, January 12th, 2009The past few weeks have been exciting for digital humanities and digital libraries projects, which are getting recognized and rewarded all over the place.
The Mellon Foundation has announced the recipients of its third annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). Among the recipients are UIUC’s brainchild Archon, archiving and publishing software for archivists and manuscript curators; George Mason University’s Omeka, another web-based publishing platform for collections; King’s College London’s Pliny Project, a scholarly annotation tool; and Villanova University’s VuFind, a library resource portal designed to replace a traditional online catalog.
Mellon isn’t the only source of recognition for digital humanities projects. A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Endowment for the Humanities has resulted in a fantastic opportunity for three major humanities projects, housed at UVA, UC San Diego and Tufts. Together, these projects will take advantage of 1 million hours of supercomputing time. This will allow humanities scholars to perform hugely computationally intensive research and processing of primary resources, be they Michelangelo’s David or linguistic corpora. Read UVA’s news release here.
Such tremendous recognition of these projects is notable not only in itself but also in conjunction with the upcoming nomination of Elena Kagan to the post of the United States Solicitor General. During her tenure as the Dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan supported the activities of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and most recently welcomed copyright law scholar Lawrence Lessig back to Harvard, to (among other things) direct the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. Having Kagan as the country’s Solicitor General is reassuring in this time of uncertain copyright law – proponents of open access and Creative-Commons-like open licensing will have an advocate in Kagan, who will (as Lessig discusses) affect policymaking on a federal level.
And speaking of policies and copyright, looks like the recording industry is looking to abandon mass lawsuits in favor of “more effective ways to combat online music piracy.” (WSJ) It’s about time; those costly lawsuits have been both ineffective in accomplishing the RIAA’s anti-piracy goals and a PR disaster (see above-linked article).
An introduction to Creative Commons licensing
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008Created by Jesse Dylan, this brief video provides an introduction to Creative Commons licensing. For more information, go to:
[video http://blip.tv/file/get/Commonscreative-ASharedCulture247.mov]
SPARC 2008: The Policy Environment
Thursday, December 4th, 2008The second day of the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 in Baltimore was no less exciting than the first, but it was shorter, and also contained less information immediately useful to us at BU. So I nursed my wrists, which had flared up with RSI for the first time in weeks (sign of a good, informative conference, no?) and took fewer notes.
Description from the program: “One of the challenges facing all repositories is the establishment of policies that positively affect the submission, accessibility, and re-use of materials. The wide spectrum of deposit mandates and recommendations currently in effect reflect the diverse nature of governmental and organizational funding objectives. This panel will provide three perspectives on these policies, representing current practices in Europe, Japan and the United States.”
1. David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe
“Public Policy Drivers for Change in Europe”
Scholarly community, as Prosser sees it, is being impacted by:
- the knowledge economy;
- accountability and assessment – value for money spent;
- e-science/e-research; and
- concerns regarding access to data and public sector information.
Measuring success can take many forms:
- impact in the relevant fields measured by number of citations;
- who is citing whom;
- number of downloads for each published item;
- patent registration; and
- rate of technology transfer.
The EU’s open access policies are still “young” and in the process of being continually tested. It’s been accepted that some situations will require an embargo period for publication of items in a freely accessible repository. This is considered a sub-optimal course of action, so generally the embargo period is encouraged to be set at a maximum of six months, with the ideal being zero – any embargo at all is a compromise, as far as open access advocates are concerned.
Prosser quoted Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, as saying the following about the university press in 1878: “It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures–but far and wide.”
[VZ: To this I will add a quote from the Massachusetts Constitution, to which I was pointed recently:
Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country...
Promotion, rather than hoarding. Preserving rights and liberties by disseminating knowledge. Clear enough.]
[The speaker who described the situation in Japan was too difficult for me to understand, alas, from the back of the room. Tried to find his slides, and failed.]
3. Bonnie Klein, Defense Technical Information Center, USA
U.S. Federal Government Repositories & Public Access to Grant Research
The U.S. is running some federal repositories: CENDI, science.gov, worldwidescience.org. All of these are concerned with federally funded grant research, and provide venues for disseminating publication requirements, as well as distribution of and access to research results. CENDI is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 13 U.S. federal agencies. WorldWideScience is more of a portal, and was launched in 2007.
In all, 26 government agencies fund over 1000 grant programs, information on all of which is available on grants.gov. The results of work funded by government grants often must be published and/or disseminated openly, unless they’re classified. They take many forms. Publications are the characteristic product (journal articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, dissertations, abstracts, interim and final tech reports). Other common products of federal-grant-funded work are websites, new networks and collaborations, technologies and techniques, inventions, patent applications, licenses, new equipment.
Klein listed some disadvantages of publishing results, and I did not have time to write them down, but mostly they amounted to secret information. There’s a slippery slope between classifying information for, say, security reasons and hoarding it, but that seems to be a problem inherent to knowledge work – I doubt there will ever come a day when we’ll have completely rigid classification criteria for knowledge, given that we keep coming up with new stuff. So we’ll just have to navigate situations as they come up.
SPARC 2008: New Horizons
Monday, December 1st, 2008Some more notes from SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008. This post covers the New Horizons session. Here’s a description of the session from the program:
Early discussion of campus-based digital repositories focused on pre-print and post-print versions of faculty research papers. Many institutions have discovered strong community interest in disseminating other types of content as well – including audio, video, image research outputs, multimedia projects, and ancillary evidence such as datasets, etc. that might be created in the course of research and class work. This interest has been strengthened by requirements set by many federal agencies that data-sharing plans accompany grant applications. The New Horizons panel will explore the transformative potential of data-intensive scholarship as well as explore solutions for the depositing dilemma that redefine the repository within the library’s “story” and scope of services.
Session format was: three presentations, then a Q&A/discussion session, and all the while the internet’s a-Twitter.
Moderator’s opening note: university communication involves many different languages—humanities languages, sciences languages, administrator languages, faculty languages, etc etc. We need to speak all these languages as we build institutional repositories (IRs) and talk about sharing.
1. Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs, The Johns Hopkins University
“A Data-centric View of the Academic Universe”
On infrastructure:
-”historical infrastructures…become ubiquitous, accessible, reliable, and transparent as they mature.” – CREW, Understanding Infrastructure
-”…they will do what we expect them to do and not do what we expect them not to do…” – Amy Friedlander, JEP Triple Helix
- Communities come together and build systems to solve their own problems. It’s really when these community systems come together that infrastructure emerges. (For example, regional vs. national railroads.)
Data are fuzzy and answers are approximate. This is a belief held both by scientists and by humanists! We don’t talk much about that similarity, which is (I imagine -vz) useful for interdisciplinary communication.
IRs are, or should be, nodes in a network, not networks unto themselves. (See also the previous post. This was a running theme of the conference.)
Remember the gopher protocol, way back when? File transfer and access, pre-web. The crucially good thing about openness of gopher: it made it easy to move its contents onto the web. So even if gopher isn’t used much anymore, its content isn’t lost but ported.
Final thoughts:
- Data are fundamentally different from collections.
- The scale and complexity of data mean that machines become necessary, with communities meeting higher-level knowledge-organization needs and machines meeting lower-level ones
- IRs are [only] the beginning of our journey
- Time to get off the e-horse!! (Sayeed is tired of e-publishing, e-formats, e-everything.) Let’s talk instead about the requirements of… faculty, admininstrators, everyone—and address those requirements.
A final quote: “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” -William Gibson
2. Shawn Martin, Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Pennsylvania
“Institutional Repository Personality Disorder: How Do We Cure It?”
Definition of personality disorder: “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it.” Talking to faculty about IRs is much like talking to them about cats. (The reaction is likely to be, “…huh?”)
Traditional arguments in favor of IRs: (1) archive forever! (2) marketing tools for departments to showcase research! (3) reclaiming intellectual property of the institution! And that’s all good and true. Here’s what they have at Penn: over 4000 documents, 73 collections, 33000 downloads per month. Sounds successful up to now! So what now?
Now they provide services. These services include, stealthily, conversations with faculty. Some things they tell the Penn faculty: downloads are important; direct communication based on people finding your stuff is great; your google rankings are important and directly influenced by having your stuff in an IR; a centralized place is easier to use than a department website. Most importantly: open access does not mean it isn’t peer reviewed.
All of the above are necessary to talk to about with faculty, because they dispel some common myths about IRs. Hence, the talk about curing the IR personality disorder. It is necessary to reframe our arguments, Shawn says. Faculty generally don’t see benefits of open access to them, but they do see the opportunity of giving themselves higher profiles inside and outside Penn. They also do see the benefits of electronic publication and of including “non-traditional” materials in repository (lecture series, proceedings, etc).
What will a future IR look like? Well, we could look at IRs as the backbone of a new scholarly communication system. Backbones, however, aren’t necessarily what is most compelling to faculty. (A similar attitude for comparison: I don’t much care about electric grids, I just want the light to go on when I flip the switch.) Penn is seeing increased interest in SelectedWorks (a front-end, user-friendly tool for its IR), e-publishing possibilities, and “front-end” services. Though IRs may be an essential component, they’re not the selling point.
So, what is the selling point? These services offered by Penn:
- Getting your scholarship into Google;
- Creating your own website;
- Creating pretty online journals;
- Clearing copyright permissions;
- Uploading articles for you.
All of Penn’s services are “fringe” from most librarians’ perspectives, but to faculty they’re incredibly important. So we need to rethink how we sell IRs to faculty. Penn is trying to turn this framework around and make these services the “core” from a faculty perspective. They are:
- not advocating for either open or closed access;
- assessing scholarly needs and providing options;
- taking advantage of the greater dissemination allowed by open access;
- but conceding that closed access may provide prestige or tenure.
So at Penn they provide both closed and open access (closed-access journals get links, abstracts and other information in SelectedWorks). They are creating virtual collections of their faculty’s work and pushing it out onto the web. They also work with publishers to promote their university’s work that may be appearing in their journals. The repository folks do all this, not faculty.
3. Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Doctoral Student, University of Hawaii
“Storytelling and Institutional Repositories”
Jennifer has performed a comparative case study analysis of IR development at six institutions in the US and Canada. Many participants stated that they didn’t know how to respond when faculty members ask why they should submit materials to the IR. So Jennifer started thinking about storytelling. Stories can be springboards: they can act as visualization tools; contextualize change, promote understanding.
Oddly, googling stories + libraries, we get many results—storytime, storytelling to dogs and so on—but not how to use storytelling in academic contexts. So Jennifer noted and recorded some opportunities for storytelling, and specific conversational triggers for them. Below are some examples.
Trigger: scholarly publishing. Story: the internet and scholarly publishing—IR as a tool for scholarly communication. Share stories with faculty about open access, etc.
Trigger: tenure. Story: IR benefits for faculty. Share stories with faculty and/or grad students about IR benefits to encourage use.
Trigger: grants. Story: faculty/library collaborations. Share stories about IR as a home for grant projects, a platform for research, an opportunity for collaboration.
Trigger: legislature. Story: showcasing what a college or university does. Share stories with administrators about the IR as a showcase for the scholarly output of the institution.
SPARC 2008: John Wilbanks’ keynote
Monday, December 1st, 2008What hasn’t John Wilbanks done? Besides his current job running Science Commons at Creative Commons, Wilbanks is a research fellow at MIT and has worked at Harvard’s Berkman Center, as a legislative aide to a U.S. Representative, and in various capacities in the open access movement. His blog is Common Knowledge, part of ScienceBlogs.
At SPARC 2008, Wilbanks gave the opening keynote, and I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off a conference—thought-provoking, full of information and yet not so much that it bogs you down—just enough to get a lively conversation flowing. Below are some of my slightly episodic notes from the keynote. If I paraphrase (or quote) incorrectly, please point this out and I’ll be glad to change accordingly. Most of the below is either straight quotation (insofar as I could type fast enough while listening to him speak) or close paraphrase. My own inserted thoughts are italicized.
Keynote, John Wilbanks, Creative Commons and MIT.
Why is there a disconnect between planning to share and the actual sharing? Why aren’t individual repositories starting to federate into a network? (This kicked off a running theme of “an interoperable network of repositories is what we should be striving for; individual repositories themselves are a stepping stone toward that goal.”)
Disruptive services can’t be planned in advance; planned innovation tends to be incremental and slow… and not innovative. Disruptive processes on the network come from people hacking, not those planning to hack. (Related: process change comes more slowly than information product change.)
He seemed to say, it’s nice and all to plan repositories, but there’s something to be said for jumping in at the deep end. This was appropriate, I think, in the context of the conference: it was later counterbalanced by specific case studies. The implication seemed to be that, by the end of SPARC 2008, we all knew enough about what to do and what not to do to make some overall structural decisions and begin implementing.
Stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels, with multiple fail-safes (redundancy). Pre-existing systems that have worked have blocks in place to prevent process disruption. Copyright locks the container of the facts in a scholarly work, even more so in a digital environment than on paper (digital environment more controllable). For example, many publishing contracts make it illegal to add hyperlinks to/from a given work—and this is technologically enforceable, as long as the work is hosted on a controllable server.
Copyright is being asserted on databases! But they’re often not creative works (for example, raw scientific data), and thus not subject to copyright. Nevertheless, copyright is asserted.
But data is integrated anyway, and we won’t be escaping from that. (Nor do/should we want to. Interoperability means dissemination of new knowledge means more new knowledge, sometimes in forms specifically enabled by the wide dissemination—think mashups.)
What do ideas addressed by Creative Commons (CC) mean in a world of integrated data?
There’s a tension between the demands of adding content and providing services. As an example, Wilbanks shows a Caveat Lector post in which Dorothea Salo describes changing a link in DSpace, which takes her an hour. And she’s no novice.
Reports from the front lines: building a commons is really, really hard. It takes dedicated, passionate people with strong points of view, who are willing to compromise on those points of view on a regular basis.
There are currently >1000 journals worldwide under a CC license. Individuals may use Scholars Copyright Integration, a single line of HTML code provided by CC, to add a standard copyright addendum to online work. But for privacy reasons, CC can’t keep data re: who uses it.
CC/Science Commons (SC) have been working not only with rights clearance (the easy part of copyright!) but also with database integration (databases integrated with each other, and into digital repositories). THAT’s the hard part. (Again, it’s all about interoperability, and the hard part seems, according to Wilbanks, be worth investing a lot of effort in.) To this end, SC has written guidelines for writing db licenses.
There’s a real danger in using the law to achieve integrity, and citation, and playing fair. It’s more about norms. (That’s part of why the DMCA failed.)
The paper, or stand-alone database, as a container for information, is a bad metaphor. We are building a web for data—the “semantic web” (a better metaphor). Links help computers understand relationships between items (coffee –> coffee pot), but not between concepts (drinking coffee –> feeling awake). This is where semantic web tools come in.
Major complaint about the semantic web: too much front-loaded work. But maybe we’re too hung up on the labels—web 2.0, science 3.0—what about making Google work better, for instance? Think about it:
-Google finds stuff based on inbound links, and assigns relevance based on that.
-SC working on open source data integration yields a repository of ontologies, namespaces, and integrated databases. The goal of such data integration: e pluribus unum.
-We can transform complex queries into links! (Hello, SQL.) The links are ugly on the back, but the front end can be concise and pretty. And as long as our data is interoperable, we can affect Google’s search result in real and useful ways.
Two possible futures lie before us. Which will we choose: a network of repositories, or a bunch of islands? Push this further: what questions can only a network of populated repositories answer?
Hope: depositing data into an IR is not something a faculty committee mandates, but something [the benefits of which] the faculty member who shares gets. Mandates are great, payments [to authors, for depositing, when you can afford this] are better, but letting people who want to share outcompete people who don’t want to share is the best.
Conclusions:
-Don’t wait. A lot of stuff needs to happen before these dreams become reality.
-Open access and IRs aren’t free as in speech, nor free as in beer, but free as in a puppy: I can give you a “free” pure-bred puppy, but you’ll be spending lots of money on that puppy for the next 15 years. (This conference’s attendance is encouraging evidence of key people being willing to invest in IRs.)
During the Q&A, someone asked: how do you talk to the faculty about the semantic web? Wilbanks said, you don’t. You talk to the people who care about the semantic web. To the faculty, you say “we’re providing a service that makes your materials more findable and more usable. All you have to do is provide us with materials and a hint or two about what they mean.”
JISC Digital Preservation Policy Report
Monday, November 24th, 2008In October of this year the UK-based Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) released a final report resulting form a six-month digital preservation policy study they’d conducted earlier in the year. The report is available here, and appendices are here (both links lead to PDF files).
Although the study was performed in the UK and the report is chiefly aimed at UK audiences, the JISC investigators drew on an international set of data, and their findings will certainly be useful to large institutions outside the Isles.
For all that the report is long and detailed, the authors’ definition of digital preservation is impressively concise: “In contrast to printed materials, digital information will not survive and remain accessible by accident: it requires ongoing active management. [...] Digital preservation is the process of active management by which we ensure that a digital object will be accessible in the future.” (10)
I list some of their recommendations below, as thinking points that jumped out at me. (My present context: recent return from the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 held in Baltimore last week, about which soon.) Much more information is available in the report itself. This is what the JISC investigators see as best practices for thinking through a digital preservation policy (DPP below) on an institutional level:
- Have a principles statement, and tie it in to the university’s stated overall aims
- Highlight connections between the DPP and other policies, practices, objectives that may be in place at the same institution; highlight also connections between the DPP and similar policies at other institutions
- Clearly state preservation objectives (archival requirements, long-term research prospects) and an intent to “deliver a reliable and authentic version to [the] user community” (19)
- Speak not only to preservation itself but also to user experience
- State explicitly which relevant governmental statutes the policy will adhere to (Freedom of Information Act, for example)
- Specify what kinds of materials will be preserved (can be presented in different groupings, for example organized by how complex preservation is for given objects, by formats, by priority)
- Specify transparency and accountability as goals, and provide venues for external entities to check on that
- Outline an implementation plan. This is possibly the most difficult step in the process, but crucial.
- The policy should be version controlled.
The report also addresses important topics like intellectual property, financial and staff responsibility, distributed services, standards compliance, auditing and risk assessment – the list goes on. Though the report is sixty pages long, it is an excellent source of information and springboard for a detailed approach to creating – and most importantly implementing – a digital preservation policy.