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

Learning and Visceral Temptation in Dynamic Savings Experiments

In models of optimal savings with income uncertainty and habit formation, people should save early to create a buffer stock, to cushion bad income draws and limit the negative internality from habit formation. In experiments in this setting, people save too little initially, but learn to save optimally within four repeated lifecycles, or 1-2 lifecycles with “social learning.” Using beverage rewards (cola) to create visceral temptation, thirsty subjects who consume immediately overspend compared to subjects who only drink after time delay. The relative overspending of immediate-consumption subjects is consistent with hyperbolic discounting and dual-self models. Estimates of the present-bias choices are β=0.6-0.7, which are consistent with other studies (albeit over different time horizons)

Lifecycles of Competition Systems: Explaining Variation in the Implementation of New Regimes

The aim of the study was to investigate the crimes and punishments that were commonly occurring between the years 1601-1651, and how the distribution was between men and women represented in the court in district Sjuhundra and Njurunda district. To answer these questions, a quantitative examination of court records conducted in which the crimes and punishments have been categorized. The results that have emerged have been the basis for the conclusions issued in the essay. The results showed that the most common target types were various civil and propertycase and the most common punishments were sentenced to fines and settlements. It was predominantly men who were in the court, the proportion of women was between 13-22%. The conclusion is that men were increasingly confronted with the court than the women and the crimes and punishments in comparison to the two districts were relatively equal

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

Examining perceptions of agility in software development practice

This is the post-print version of the final published article that is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 ACM.Organizations undertaking software development are often reminded that successful practice depends on a number of non-technical issues that are managerial, cultural and organizational in nature. These issues cover aspects from appropriate corporate structure, through software process development and standardization to effective collaborative practice. Since the articulation of the 'software crisis' in the late-1960s, significant effort has been put into addressing problems related to the cost, time and quality of software development via the application of systematic processes and management practices for software engineering. Early efforts resulted in prescriptive structured methods, which have evolved and expanded over time to embrace consortia/ company-led initiatives such as the Unified Modeling Language and the Unified Process alongside formal process improvement frameworks such as the International Standards Organization's 9000 series, the Capability Maturity Model and SPICE. More recently, the philosophy behind traditional plan-based initiatives has been questioned by the agile movement, which seeks to emphasize the human and craft aspects of software development over and above the engineering aspects. Agile practice is strongly collaborative in its outlook, favoring individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan (see Sidebar 1). Early experience reports on the use of agile practice suggest some success in dealing with the problems of the software crisis, and suggest that plan-based and agile practice are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, flexibility may arise from this unlikely marriage in an aim to strike a balance between the rigor of traditional plan-based approaches and the need for adaptation of those to suit particular development situations. With this in mind, this article surveys the current practice in software engineering alongside perceptions of senior development managers in relation to agile practice in order to understand the principles of agility that may be practiced implicitly and their effects on plan-based approach

Life Cycle and Cohort Productivity in Economic Research: The Case of Germany

We examine the research productivity of German academic economists over their life cycles. It turns out that the career-patterns of research productivity as measured by journal publications are characterized by marked cohort effects. Moreover, the life-cycles of younger German economists are hump-shaped and closely resemble the life cycles identified for U.S. economists, whereas the life-cycles of older German economists are much flatter. Finally, we find that not only productivity, but also research quality follows distinct life cycles. Our study employs econometric techniques that are likely to produce estimates that are more trustworthy than previous estimates.research productivity, life cycles, cohort effects