The LIFE2 final project report

Executive summary: The first phase of LIFE (Lifecycle Information For E-Literature) made a major contribution to understanding the long-term costs of digital preservation; an essential step in helping institutions plan for the future. The LIFE work models the digital lifecycle and calculates the costs of preserving digital information for future years. Organisations can apply this process in order to understand costs and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections The second phase of the LIFE Project, LIFE2, has refined the LIFE Model adding three new exemplar Case Studies to further build upon LIFE1. LIFE2 is an 18-month JISC-funded project between UCL (University College London) and The British Library (BL), supported by the LIBER Access and Preservation Divisions. LIFE2 began in March 2007, and completed in August 2008. The LIFE approach has been validated by a full independent economic review and has successfully produced an updated lifecycle costing model (LIFE Model v2) and digital preservation costing model (GPM v1.1). The LIFE Model has been tested with three further Case Studies including institutional repositories (SHERPA-LEAP), digital preservation services (SHERPA DP) and a comparison of analogue and digital collections (British Library Newspapers). These Case Studies were useful for scenario building and have fed back into both the LIFE Model and the LIFE Methodology. The experiences of implementing the Case Studies indicated that enhancements made to the LIFE Methodology, Model and associated tools have simplified the costing process. Mapping a specific lifecycle to the LIFE Model isn’t always a straightforward process. The revised and more detailed Model has reduced ambiguity. The costing templates, which were refined throughout the process of developing the Case Studies, ensure clear articulation of both working and cost figures, and facilitate comparative analysis between different lifecycles. The LIFE work has been successfully disseminated throughout the digital preservation and HE communities. Early adopters of the work include the Royal Danish Library, State Archives and the State and University Library, Denmark as well as the LIFE2 Project partners. Furthermore, interest in the LIFE work has not been limited to these sectors, with interest in LIFE expressed by local government, records offices, and private industry. LIFE has also provided input into the LC-JISC Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Preservation. Moving forward our ability to cost the digital preservation lifecycle will require further investment in costing tools and models. Developments in estimative models will be needed to support planning activities, both at a collection management level and at a later preservation planning level once a collection has been acquired. In order to support these developments a greater volume of raw cost data will be required to inform and test new cost models. This volume of data cannot be supported via the Case Study approach, and the LIFE team would suggest that a software tool would provide the volume of costing data necessary to provide a truly accurate predictive model

The LIFE Model v1.1

Extract: This document draws together feedback, discussion and review of the LIFE Model from a number of sources: 1. The LIFE and LIFE2 Project Teams, and the staff of their institutions 2. Feedback from review by independent economics expert 3. The LIFE Project Conference 4. Early adopters of the Life Model (particularly the Royal Danish Library, State Archives and the State and University Library, Denmark) The result is a revision of the LIFE Model which was first published in 2006 by the LIFE Project . In line with the objectives of the LIFE2 Project, this revision aims to: 1. fix outstanding anomalies or omissions in the Model 2. scope and define the Model and its components more precisely 3. facilitate useful and repeatable mapping and costing of digital lifecycles

Lifecycle information for e-literature: full report from the LIFE project

This Report is a record of the LIFE Project. The Project has been run for one year and its aim is to deliver crucial information about the cost and management of digital material. This information should then in turn be able to be applied to any institution that has an interest in preserving and providing access to electronic collections. The Project is a joint venture between The British Library and UCL Library Services. The Project is funded by JISC under programme area (i) as listed in paragraph 16 of the JISC 4/04 circular- Institutional Management Support and Collaboration and as such has set requirements and outcomes which must be met and the Project has done its best to do so. Where the Project has been unable to answer specific questions, strong recommendations have been made for future Project work to do so. The outcomes of this Project are expected to be a practical set of guidelines and a framework within which costs can be applied to digital collections in order to answer the following questions: • What is the long term cost of preserving digital material; • Who is going to do it; • What are the long term costs for a library in HE/FE to partner with another institution to carry out long term archiving; • What are the comparative long-term costs of a paper and digital copy of the same publication; • At what point will there be sufficient confidence in the stability and maturity of digital preservation to switch from paper for publications available in parallel formats; • What are the relative risks of digital versus paper archiving. The Project has attempted to answer these questions by using a developing lifecycle methodology and three diverse collections of digital content. The LIFE Project team chose UCL e-journals, BL Web Archiving and the BL VDEP digital collections to provide a strong challenge to the methodology as well as to help reach the key Project aim of attributing long term cost to digital collections. The results from the Case Studies and the Project findings are both surprising and illuminating

A Semantic-based framework for discovering business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modeling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. This paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework synthesizes the idea from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Object-oriented modelling with unified modelling language 2.0 for simple software application based on agile methodology

Unified modelling language (UML) 2.0 introduced in 2002 has been developing and influencing object-oriented software engineering and has become a standard and reference for information system analysis and design modelling. There are many concepts and theories to model the information system or software application with UML 2.0, which can make ambiguities and inconsistencies for a novice to learn to how to model the system with UML especially with UML 2.0. This article will discuss how to model the simple software application by using some of the diagrams of UML 2.0 and not by using the whole diagrams as suggested by agile methodology. Agile methodology is considered as convenient for novices because it can deliver the information technology environment to the end-user quickly and adaptively with minimal documentation. It also has the ability to deliver best performance software application according to the customer's needs. Agile methodology will make simple model with simple documentation, simple team and simple tools.Comment: 15 pages, 30 figure

LIBER's involvement in supporting digital preservation in member libraries

Digital curation and preservation represent new challenges for universities. LIBER has invested considerable effort to engage with the new agendas of digital preservation and digital curation. Through two successful phases of the LIFE project, LIBER is breaking new ground in identifying innovative models for costing digital curation and preservation. Through LIFE’s input into the US-UK Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, LIBER is aligned with major international work in the economics of digital preservation. In its emerging new strategy and structures, LIBER will continue to make substantial contributions in this area, mindful of the needs of European research libraries

Optimising metadata workflows in a distributed information environment

The different purposes present within a distributed information environment create the potential for repositories to enhance their metadata by capitalising on the diversity of metadata available for any given object. This paper presents three conceptual reference models required to achieve this optimisation of metadata workflow: the ecology of repositories, the object lifecycle model, and the metadata lifecycle model. It suggests a methodology for developing the metadata lifecycle model, and illustrates how it might be used to enhance metadata within a network of repositories and services

Lifecycle information for E-literature: an introduction to the second phase of the LIFE project

Introduction: The first phase of LIFE (Lifecycle Information For E-Literature) made a major contribution to understanding the long-term costs of digital preservation; an essential step in helping institutions plan for the future. The LIFE work models the digital lifecycle and calculates the costs of preserving digital information for future years. Organisations can apply this process in order to understand costs and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections The second phase of the LIFE Project, LIFE2, has refined the LIFE Model adding three new exemplar Case Studies to further build upon LIFE1. LIFE2 is an 18-month JISC-funded project between UCL (University College London) and The British Library (BL), supported by the LIBER Access and Preservation Divisions. LIFE1 was completed in April 2006. LIFE2 started in March 2007, and was completed in August 2008. This summary aims to give an overview of the LIFE Project, summarising some of the key outputs. There are four main areas discussed: 1 From LIFE1 to LIFE2 outlines some of the key findings from the first phase of the project as well as summarising the motivation behind this second phase. 2 The LIFE Model describes the current version of the model (version 2) which has been thoroughly updated from the first phase. 3 LIFE2 Case Studies describes the three new Case Studies for LIFE2. It does not include the results from the Case Studies (these are available in the overall LIFE2 Report), but offers some background on each of the studies as well as discussion of why they were chosen. 4 Findings and Conclusions outlines all of the findings and outputs from the entire project