BlogForever D3.3: Development of the Digital Rights Management Policy

This report presents a set of recommended practices and approaches that a future BlogForever repository can use to develop a digital rights management policy. The report outlines core legal aspects of digital rights that might need consideration in developing policies, and what the challenges are, in particular, in relation to web archives and blog archives. These issues are discussed in the context of the digital information life cycle and steps that might be taken within the workflow of the BlogForever platform to facilitate the gathering and management of digital rights information. Further, the reports on interviews with experts in the field highlight current perspectives on rights management and provide empirical support for the recommendations that have been put forward

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Assessing Institutional Digital Assets Final Report

AIDA has delivered a workable toolkit which will allow institutions based in UK Higher and Further Education to perform an assessment of their capability to manage their digital assets. Unlike other assessment surveys, AIDA is not focussed on individual asset types, nor on file formats, nor on extant systems for managing assets. Instead, it takes a holistic view using a method that encompasses an understanding of organisational, technological, and resource issues

JISC Web Archiving Options Study

This report was commissioned by JISC to support the formulation of strategy with archiving JISC websites

Digital Asset Assessment Tool Final Report

DAAT aimed to produce and test a Digital Asset Assessment Tool which would enable institutions which had already identified their digital assets to assess which of those assets were at greatest preservation risk, and make informed decisions, informed by both value and risk, on how to deploy possibly limited resources on digital preservation across the institution

Into the Contact Zone: A reflective evaluation of open online digital curation education

This article focuses on two UK based online courses in the field of digital curation and preservation; Introduction to Digital Curation, run by University College London, and The Beginner’s Guide to the OAIS Reference Model Course, run by the University of London Computer Centre. The courses are considered not against the frame of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as a revolutionary force in education, but against the metaphor of the ‘contact zone’ (adopted from the work of Costis Dallas (2015)), as part of the ongoing development and establishment of digital curation as a field of study. Two dimensions of difference are examined; firstly that between face to face and online learning, and secondly that between different groups of learners (such as current professionals and future professionals).  It concludes that open online education is best seen as a contact zone less in the sense of being the teaching of a professional field of practice and more in the sense of advocacy and the provision of informative resources and enlightening experiences that pique the interest, increase awareness and most of all, make contact

Data Preservation for Historians

The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to implementable best practice for ensuring the continued access to and preservation of your digital research data over time. Starting a research project can be overwhelming, so it is important to manage your data to ensure you don’t lose it. We aim to provide an overview of the issues and suggest solutions for how to preserve your research data. The course was prepared by the JISC-funded SHARD project at the University of London. The materials were specifically designed for ease of accessibility and pitched at the appropriate level. The results have been validated by IHR's Research Training Group

Digital Preservation Tools for Repository Managers 1: organisational issues

The 5-module JISC KeepIt course on Digital Preservation Tools for Repository Managers was designed by repository managers. Each module consists of a mix of short presentations and hands-on exercises to learn about the basics and gain practice with each of the tools covered. Module 1 covers organisational issues such as scoping the repository, selection, assessment and institutional parameters. Tools include the Data Asset Framework (DAF) for scoping data content for institutional repositories, and the AIDA toolkit for assessing institutional capabilities to support digital asset management. Materials here include presentations on these tools, also on how the DAF was used to scope data types in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Southampton, and an introduction to the module. Details of the exercises are provided, so the full course module can be experienced by other users

D2.2 Report: BlogForever Data Model

This report outlines the development of a data model to support the preservation, management and dissemination of blogs. It outlines the literature and relevant approaches to data modelling and proceeds to describe the inquiries that informed the development of the proposed data model. The report identifies the data structures considered necessary for preserving blogs by revisiting the earlier inquiry summarised in the BlogForever Report, Deliverable 2.1 [1]. The report includes an inquiry into [a] the existing conceptual models of blogs, [b] the data models of Open Source blogging systems, and [c] data types identified from an empirical study of web feeds. The results, the report progresses to propose a data model intended to enable preservation of blogs and their individual components. Following internal consultation exercises from blog service providers and preservation experts, the proposed data model may require further refinement in accordance with the anticipated development of preservation policies (WP3), data extraction methodologies (WP2) and user requirements for platform BlogForever specification (WP4). Finally, the report positions and discusses the proposed data model alongside the Invenio software suite by highlighting the anticipated data flow and suggesting directions for their integration