Bits and bobs

Over the past week or so I've collected together a few random repository related items that might be of interest to our partners. Enjoy!

Copyright Workflows
Ann Hanlon and Marisa Ramirez. "Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories" 2010
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/marisa_ramirez/14

This poster details the results of a US survey about copyright workflows and was presented at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, Washington, D.C. in June 2010. Exploring staffing, resources, activities and tools employed to clear copyright for published work, with the intent to deposit into an IR, this nicely summarises their preliminary findings. In 2008 a survey was undertaken in the UK on the same topic:

Jones, Mark. Intellectual property rights survey, University of East Anglia, 2008
http://www.uea.ac.uk/is/digitalrepository/heiprsurvey

New Team Digital Preservation Film
WePreserve and Planets have released their fourth Team Digital Preservation film. Team Digital Preservation and Arctic Mountain Adventure is available to view at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGFOZLecjTc.



Digiman is baby-sitting his niece and nephew for the weekend, but things go horribly wrong when he sends them out on an arctic mountain adventure. Never fear trusty viewers, PLATO, the Planets Preservation Planning tool, comes to the rescue to show Digiman the error of his ways.

Other editions of these popular videos are available here http://www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve

Metadata Forum
At the Open Repositories Conference 2010 last week in Madrid the Metadata Forum was officially launched. A new initiative, run by UKOLN at the University of Bath and funded by JISC, the Metadata Forum is planning four face-to-face meetings throughout the UK and ongoing conversations online where anyone who has an interest in metadata can ask for help, share experiences and learn from others. The Forum is open to everyone, from novice to expert and anyone in between who deals with metadata in their day-to-day work.

Get involved by following the Forum blog - http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/themetadataforum or following the Forum on Twitter – @MetadataForum

SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle white paper
http://sword2depositlifecycle.jiscpress.org/

The aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion around introducing more complete treatment of "deposit lifecycle" management of objects in digital repositories, and to propose the next small steps in this direction. Abstract:

"SWORD is a hugely successful JISC project which has kindled repository interoperability and built a community around the software and the problem space. It explicitly deals only with creating new repository resources by package deposit a simple case which is at the root of its success but also its key limitation. This next version of SWORD will push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles by using update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases."

Preservation for Repository Practitioners

Aston Business School Birmingham, Thursday 27th May 2010.

In conjunction with the Repositories Support Project (RSP) and the Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland project (ERIS), we here at WRN are organising a free, one- day workshop at the Aston Business School Conference Centre Birmingham on Thursday 27th May, looking at preservation issues and repositories.

We have created a hands-on, practical programme with preservation tool presentations from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the PLANETS project as well as facilitated discussion sessions looking in to preservation issues and your repository, and how to construct an action plan and preservation policy to use in your institution.

For a draft programme and booking please see the RSP event page.

Digital Preservation Roadshow, Aberystwyth

Last Friday Jackie and I presented at the CyMAL / Society of Archivists Digital Preservation Roadshow held at the National Library of Wales (NLW) . The event was aimed at all practitioners who were involved with the management of digital records, with delegates coming from different organisations within the public sector including Welsh regional archive services, Universities and the NLW.

Our presentation looked jointly at the approaches taken to digital preservation within the repository community and how preservation is being put into action within our e-theses harvesting workpackage, being conducted with the NLW. The presentation that followed ours was delivered by our NLW partner, Glen Robson, who discussed what was going to happen to the harvested e-theses records once they had reached the NLW repository or DAMS (digital asset management system) as they call it.

Other interesting presentations during the day included:

• A forecast of the necessary skills needed by future practitioners to manage and preserve digital records, given by Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher, Records Management Lecturer at the Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University.

• An entertaining and engaging presentation on METS and other standards including PREMIS by Lyn Lewis Dafis, Head of Metadata and Digitisation Unit, NLW. Actually making these complicated metadata standards understandable for the non-techies like me!

• An overview of the digital preservation policy planning at Cardiff University by Sarah Phillips, Records Manager.

• Short description of a useful tool to assess file format suitability in terms of preservation developed by the National Library of the Netherlands and utilised by the NLW from Ioan Isaac-Richards.

The Society of Archivists hopes to have the presentations for the day available via the Digital Preservation Roadshows 2009- 10 webpage soon.

Preservation event planning

In conjunction with our sister projects RSP and ERIS, the WRN are planning some one-day events looking at digital preservation and repositories. The programme will specifically target repository practitioners and will be aimed at beginners. In order to ensure as many people as possible are able to attend we are tentatively planning to repeat the event in various locations around the UK. Provisional dates are under discussion for Cardiff, Birmingham and Edinburgh in May 2010.

We are very keen that these events are of real practical use to the repository community, so in order to help us plan theses events, we would appreciate it if you could take the time to complete this quick question.

If you would like to register your interest for one of these events, please visit http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/92F89A8D8D2C15BE.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

Digital Preservation Roadshow: NLW, Friday 22nd January

The Society of Archivists in association with CyMAL are bringing a Digital Preservation Roadshow event to the National Library of Wales (NLW) on Friday 22nd January. This roadshow is one of the last in a series that have been held at various locations around the UK and Ireland. The aims of the events have been 'to raise awareness of the issues surrounding digital preservation, to demonstrate that there are solutions that don't involve spending large amounts of money, and to show how to take the first, small, incremental steps in this field.'

Jackie and I will be giving a presentation at the event regarding repositories and preservation, the WRN project and the e-theses harvesting workpackage. There will also be presentations from NLW staff exploring the strategies they employ to preserve the digital items that the library holds, including a specific presentation from Glen Robson regarding 'Harvesting and DAMS' which is of particular interest in light of the e-theses harvesting workpackage.

Other speakers at the event inlude:

Tim Gollins, National Archives
William Kilbride, Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Executive
Sarah Phillips, University Records Manager, Cardiff University

An event programme is available to download from the Digital Preservation Roadshows 2009- 10 webpage.

Attendance at the roadshow is free but numbers are limited. To book a place, fill out the booking form available from the CyMAL event page and send it to cymal@wales.gsi.gov.uk