The DPC is dedicated to developing the skills, knowledge and solutions to preserve and ensure access to digital information. 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the DPC and I had the pleasure of being a judge at this year’s awards.

I enjoyed working with colleagues from across the UK to assess the entries.  I saw some of the strides that have been made in digital preservation, and coming from one of the organisations that founded the DPC, I was certainly pleased to see such positive progress and the DPC’s ability to highlight this.

The DPC’s most prestigious prize – the Decennial Prize – was awarded to mark their 10th anniversary and recognizes the most outstanding work over the past decade.   There was intense international competition with finalists from New York, Washington and London.  Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of The British Library, July 2000-July 2012, presented the award to the winning entry - the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York.

It was heartening to see this award go to an initiative which we at Jisc supported at their inception and which continues to be successful.  The team at York are a creative group who have developed and thrived within an innovative business model that allows them to preserve an extraordinary range of data while providing free access to all researchers and other users.  This approach ensures the longevity of data that would otherwise rapidly be lost or become obsolete and provides advice to researchers.

The Award for Teaching and Communications, presented by Oliver Morley, chief executive of the National Archives team, was awarded to the University of London Computer Centre team who run the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP); an entry-level, introductory course that develops critical thinking about digital preservation.  It is designed to help all those working in information management to understand effective approaches to the challenges of digital preservation.  It enables students on the course to assess the models and examples in the context of their own organisation.

The Award for Research and Innovation was presented by Martyn Harrow, chief executive of Jisc to the PLANETS project.  PLANETS brings together memory institutions, small businesses, major technology providers, and research institutions from across Europe to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital, cultural and scientific assets.  It established the not-for-profit Open Planets Foundation to provide the digital preservation community with services, ongoing support, and a sustainable future for its Open Source results.  It has permanently changed the digital preservation landscape by shifting the focus to practical, sustainable solutions that are soundly supported by practice-driven research.

Digital preservation ensures future access to resources and I believe this is essential for research, learning and future knowledge creation.  Just think of all of the digital information that is created on the web and how that represents points in time that can be lost without action, or all of the data produced through scientific instruments that informs science and understanding – digital preservation helps to secure continued access to these resources.

I am looking forward to what the coming years will bring in terms of digital preservation and I am sure the DPC will be central to showcasing international best practice.  The awards were a great way of recognising important work and I have to say it was really enjoyable working with William Kilbride, executive director of the DPC on this, and being one of the judges.

“Digitisation breathes new life into material from the past, and turns it into a formidable asset for the individual user and an important building block of the digital economy.”[1]

Still, the way we create content online is still in its infancy, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged:

• Project leaders return again and again to funders, because alternative revenue streams have not been developed;
• Completed projects cannot always be updated/ungraded once funded has ended;
• Content created may live in silos, be difficult to find and hosted on a variety of platforms;
• Preservation strategies are often uncertain, both for digitised and born digital content;
• Project leaders often rely heavily on the largesse of a host institution
• Some programmes or projects that cease to secure ongoing funding are obliged to stop work altogether

Add to this the challenging economic environment of the past few years and all of these issues are brought into glaringly sharp relief.

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance have led the way in examining ways  that the academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and helping to make sure that the digital resources will endure and provide value well beyond the term of the grant. In 2012, two years and one economic crisis later, this essential research is more important than ever to answer questions such as:

• What were the key sustainability issues to consider?
• How have project leaders made their resources valuable to users?
• How have project leaders made growth and innovation possible?
• Which sustainability models have been most successful?
• How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects?

Answers to these questions however are never simple and the process by which projects, both current and previous, consider them are multifaceted and complex. As a first step to traversing the difficult road to sustainability, the following video lecture series has been developed with Nancy Maron (sustainability expert at Ithaka S+R) to consider how universities, museums and libraries can deal with these issues in a challenging economic environment. You may not find all the answers here, but you will certainly find out more about the questions you need to be asking and guidance on how to answer them.

Split into parts or available as full versions, the videos (under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence) allow for individuals or organisations to embed or repurpose the relevant sections for their own specific audiences. As they are in easily digestible ‘bite-size’ chunks with links to the relevant resources referenced, these should help you to think in more depth about the issues raised and to read and research at your own pace. All we ask is that you let us know how you are planning to use them and if/ how these have been useful to you.

Please follow the links below to view the videos most relevant to your sector:

Sustaining Digital Resources for Universities

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sustaining Digital Resource for Museums

Sustaining Digital Resources for Libraries

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

How universities and researchers manage the issues around research data varies massively – and of course will depend on the type of data they hold – whether sound recordings of bird songs, text mining results from Shakespeare’s plays, thousands of measurements provided by space probes, hours of rare film recordings, DNA sequences or qualitative data from psychological research interviews.

JISC is live streaming its conference next Tuesday 13 September around research integrity – specifically on the importance of good research data management.  Our aim is to bring together the current thinking on effective practice and give senior staff and researchers an opportunity to debate the thornier issues, like whose responsibility this is and how to manage freedom of information requests.

We welcome your input: submit your questions via twitter by using #jiscres11 and we’ll put them to our panel.  You can also watch the keynote speakers live on Tuesday, who alongside me include:

• Professor David Baker, deputy chair of JISC
• Professor Dave De Roure, professor of e-research, Oxford University e-Research Centre and national strategic director of Digital Social Research
• Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, principal and vice chancellor of University of Edinburgh and chair of JISC
• Professor Kevin Schürer, pro vice chancellor (Research and Enterprise), University of Leicester

During the conference you will:

• Learn why research data management matters and who should be responsible for research data management in your organisation
• Read recommended reports and resources as they are referred to by the speakers
• Understand from case studies what success might look like
• Watch key experts describe the routes to successful data management
• Participate on Twitter and ask questions of the speakers using #jiscres11

It’s the kind of discussion we think could be helpful to professionals in the UK and internationally so if you know people who you think would be interested I’d really value you sending this information on.

There’s no need to register – simply add a date in your diary for 10am on 13 September 2011 and join us online here.

Watch a video about how JISC can support your research reputation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit JISC’s Youtube channel to watch similar videos on research efficiency and collaboration

The committee’s report, now available online, describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each other’s results.  It highlights that reproducibility should be the gold standard that all peer reviewers and editors aim for when assessing a manuscript. This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils.But researchers will also be aware of the challenges of making their data sets available to reviewers.  In the longer term, there are technical and economic challenges associated with making data available, especially as different types of data require different treatment. A lot of social data that is created through longitudinal studies makes sense only if the entire length of the study is available. Other data, such as environmental data, must be kept permanently available – you can’t repeat an earthquake.

Keeping data like this available in perpetuity is expensive and could end up as a cost that universities across the world simply cannot afford.  JISC is funding Dryad-UK which mirrors a US initiative to help researchers control who sees their data and when.  Researchers can deposit their data in a secure environment and then give privileged access to reviewers, for example, and then make the data available more widely once the article is published.

However, in some areas of science the data is produced by computers and programs and is correspondingly huge. Storing indefinitely the mass of outputs of Large Hadron Collider experiments is unfeasible. So we have to make it possible for people to re-run the programme, something that requires you know quite a lot about the machine and the environment it is running on in order to understand the data.  As long as the researcher defines the input conditions, and what the program is designed to do, you should be able to trust the outputs. And if we ensure that authors make clear the nature of the program they are running and the algorithms then people in the future should be able to re-run the program to retrieve the data.  I’m hinting of course that beyond the software or statistical test is something much more fundamental – the accuracy of the data itself.

As part of the report’s consultation process I was asked to comment on whether, in some cases, peer review might encourage a tendency towards conservative judgements among reviewers. But peer review in one form or another has been an underpinning aspect of research arguably since before journals as we know existed. As the report highlights, journal editors are well-placed to find the right experts to review unusual research, so the process itself cuts against the conservatism. Online publication affords us a great deal more flexibility in how the peer review process works.  In the past, two different forms of assessment have happened as part of a single process.  Both the technical assessment and the impact assessment have happened after publication of a research paper.  But separating the two processes is important because of the longer time scale over which you get your answer – so it’s encouraging that the committee’s report recommends a pre-publication technical assessment.

Another criticism sometimes levelled at peer review is that it is a burden on academics who have to do this in their own time.  But few researchers feel they have a nine-to-five existence anyway. In my experience reviewing manuscripts outside of a regular working day is part of the mentality in the research community. The situation would only become worrying if researchers had to spend more time on peer review proportionate to their own research. Greater transparency in the process might also help garner more recognition for peer reviewers, by ensuring that an individual reviewer’s work is known to their peers.  The committee report rightly highlights that we need to encourage researchers to deposit their data, rather than enforce it. Researchers deserve credit and recognition for working in an open way. It’s a complex situation, so a blanket mandate on open data might not be feasible but we need to create the right conditions so it is easier for researchers to make their data openly available.

This blog post first appeared in Research Information.

It is becoming evident that the conflicts and indeed the events of the 20th century can be fully investigated only when today’s historians have the equivalent relationship to the moving image as they have to the recorded text.

This short video by the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank highlights the issues involved in opening up access to film archives.

Film and television archives, delivered over the web, are as essential for learning today as libraries of books. Students already expect to use the full gamut of rich media in their education, and by 2014 video will account for 91% of global consumer traffic on the internet.

However, a recent report from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank identifies what it refers to as the “AV gap” (the Audio Visual gap) between the expectations of learners and the reality of education today.

The report says, “The engines of our screen culture – film, television, and radio – were the dominant media of the 20th century, and many of the most important and most memorable messages of the 20th and 21st centuries have been expressed in moving images and sound. Yet education has far to go still to incorporate them systematically in teaching and learning.”

The Film & Sound Think Tank was convened with the aim of advising  JISC on all issues relating to the creation, discovery, use, delivery and preservation of film and sound resources in education and to input into relevant strategic and policy areas.

Contributors came from a broad set of organisations within broadcast, production, archives, research and education.  Those who contributed to the work clearly recognised that there was an opportunity to work in partnership to enhance film and sound archive provision – and all were interested in the challenges and opportunities around enhancing usage for education, research and beyond.

The report marks the culmination of the group’s work and proposes a series of strategic recommendations aimed at promoting current audiovisual collections and making them easily findable and usable for educational purposes.

The recommendations include, among others, strategies for improving resource discovery, clarifying licensing information, allowing more sophisticated manipulation and citation of moving images, and partnership work between Higher Education institutions and producers and broadcasters.

These high level approaches echo the more practical, every day, barriers to embed sound and moving images in education also identified in this blog post.

We are currently exploring how the recommendations made by the group can be taken forward in collaboration with JISC Services and other organizations working in this area. For example through enhancements to relevant JISC Services such as BUFVC, JISC Digital Media and MediaHub as well as through forthcoming projects to commemorate the anniversary of the First World War and activities around the BBC-led Digital Public Space.

The report was written by Paul Gerhardt and Peter B. Kaufman and can be found here together with a range of video resources and podcasts.

A summary downloadable pdf version of the report is available here.

When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?

At the BUFVC we offer access to many different types of datasets, from listings of practically everything that was broadcast on British TV and radio since 2001, to newsreels produced throughout the 20th century. In the United Kingdom there is no audiovisual equivalent for the British Library legal deposit. We therefore work hard to fill that information gap and find ways for education institutions to gain access to audiovisual content.

When we thought of ‘federating’ most of our data (searching it all at once) we thought it would be easy. And it was. We know our data well and could map it quickly.  But that wasn’t the real challenge. It was by looking at how users interacted with the developing system that we learnt the key lessons. If you are searching our 13 million records there are two difficult steps: what to type in that search box and how to then get rid of all the stuff you don’t want.

The answer to the first dilemma – how to stop users worrying about the empty search box – was to make it less important. We needed to make sure that whatever the exact search term, users should be able to make interesting discoveries even if the results were not the best. To do this we created relationships between our records based on semantics. This means that users will see suggestions for searches and records that may take them in different (but related) journeys.

The second dilemma is all about filtering. The search results page became our control centre, allowing users to filter results, tweak searches, see the suggestions for related searches and use a variety of additional tools. All this makes for a busy page but after many rounds of user testing we think our designer hit the right balance between complexity and elegance. Some of these features include:
•    Human-friendly filters such as identifying results by availability (‘can I see it online, do I need to order it from someone?), media type (moving image, audio, documents), genre or collection
•    A comprehensive history function that keeps track of viewed records, searches and tweaks to searches and the ability to mark and cite or export records in a variety of standards

When reflecting back on the project, I remember mostly the sense of fun, the permission we gave ourselves to think creatively, and our exciting user testing rounds. Developers and users don’t often mix but with good moderation these sessions proved magical. These are three elements I would urge anyone to replicate in future projects.

We are not alone in this development; sites that enable discovery and aggregate results from multiple collections are increasing in number – Edina’s JISC Media Hub is well worth a visit. We hope to have created something which rewards users with new connections through discovery. Work will only be completed in September and there are many plans beyond that. In the meantime if you are looking for moving image and sound, be it television or radio, newsreels or commercially available programmes for education pay a visit to our beta site and give us your feedback. If you are reading this from a UK higher or further education institution, please remember to login to access all areas.

The open-source based software and interface will be released as a package under an Open Source licence later this year. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Carrasqueiro is Chief Executive, British Universities Film & Video Council
luis@bufvc.ac.uk

This statement is revealing of wider issues institutions face in today’s times of financial constraints: how do we know if a digital resource is having an impact on its target audience? How do we reach and speak to scholars, teachers and students to measure their satisfaction? What metrics should be adopted in the context of digitised scholarly material? How much does a digital resource tell about the institution that created it? And above all, has the investment paid back? These are not easy things to assess and often impact just takes time to materialise.

In order to support content creators, resources managers and information professionals within institutions in the task of assessing the usage and impact of their digital resources, JISC has supported the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The toolkit, first developed in 2009 and recently updated, provides a framework for conducting this kind of analysis and offers guidance on a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that can be used such as webometrics, content analysis, surveys and focus groups. The TIDSR was used by projects in the JISC Impact and embedding of digitised resources programme, of which the Old Bailey was one, to conduct an analysis of their collections, identify where resources were working well and what could be done to improve them and better embed their content within teaching and research.

The case studies drawn from the experience of the projects are available in the toolkit and are a useful starting point for beginners in the field. They also provided fertile ground for the programme’s final report, “Splashes and Ripples: Synthesising the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources” (PDF), by Eric Meyer. The report begins to sketch a picture, based on evidence rather than anecdotes, of how digitised resources in the humanities are currently being used and provides a set of recommendations to content creators on how to go about maximising the impact of their resource such as:

[quote from report]

1.     Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users. A number of projects had a difficult time finding users to survey or interview, but users are a key resource that you will want to approach from time to time.

2.     Use the media to your advantage. One of the undeniable advantages that arts and humanities resources have in the United Kingdom is that there is considerable public interest in these topics. […] The Old Bailey Proceedings Online project has benefitted from inclusion in popular BBC programmes (see page 11).

3.     The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics. Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports (see page 21).

4.     Make your resource easy to find. This can involve a number of strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), partnerships with more prominent related sources (see page 31), links in related sites, and inclusion in Wikipedia and other sources. A Vision of Britain through Time has been the most proactive resource in this regard, (see page 28),

5.     Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initialism, both to increase the likelihood that your resource turns up at the top of relevant searches, and to make measuring mentions of your resource result in as few false positives as possible.

6.     Create quick wins for new visitors to your collection. By finding things that they can quickly learn, do, see, or contribute, you can increase the stickiness of your site, and increase the likelihood that your resources will be used. Oxford University’s podcasts, for instance, are easy to immediately access and hear (see page 23).

7.     Leverage your wins. Using the most popular aspects of your resource to attract people to other parts of the collection via features such as suggested links and recommendations for further information can increase the time spent with your collection.

8.     Adopt Cool URLs as persistent, consistent, human-readable, and citable links to digital resources. The British History Online collection has used this method to increase the readability of its links (see page 39).

9.     Provide the ability to export citations directly to reference management software such as Zotero and EndNote.

10.     APIs are the future. Linked data, apps, and other ways that enable researchers to access and combine the data in your resource will increase its utility.

That’s a good strong statement, but what are the questions? Before you read on, let’s just establish that you are interested in long term access to, and use of, digital information, otherwise known as Digital Preservation, because let’s face it, this isn’t a topic that gets a lot of people fired up. However, if you are still reading, then this is your chance to learn why the OPF seems to have some of the answers.

The OPF is an international membership organisation that was setup early last year following on from an influential 4 year long EU funded digital preservation project called PLANETS (Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked services. This project delivered a suite of open-source free tools for planning and carrying out preservation tasks and by the end of it, it was clear that some way was needed to continue to support and develop this important work outside of the context of continued funding from the European Commission. So … led by the British Library, they decided to join forces to keep this work going.

It seems to be working well so the first question they appeared to have answered is – ‘how do we transition from project funding to a more sustainable model?’. The OPF is an unusual and effective example of a funded project finding a sustainable route for continuing its work and the calibre and nature of the organisations that are involved as charter and affiliate members testify to the importance of the work it is undertaking.

Another question it seems to be answering is ‘how can we collaborate effectively?’. One of the goals of the OPF is to identify and foster an international community of developers that is capable of creating, enhancing and refining the tools we have at our collective disposal for preserving all kinds of digital objects. It makes sense that the OPF will become an indispensable ally for organisations with a preservation problem or projects that need expert input with technical solutions. Developers with the right technical skills in this domain are a critical resource and any initiative that focuses on supporting and promoting this particular group of people is an initiative that is worth supporting.

The third question that I think the OPF is well positioned to answer is ‘how do I know that I can trust the digital preservation solution that is on offer?’. This issue of trust is a pivotal and ongoing issue for many different aspects of information strategy. Can I trust this agency to look after my information properly?; how do I know that this service will remain viable for the foreseeable future?; do I believe that this persistent identifier scheme really will be persistent?; and so on and so forth. I’m not suggesting that the OPF instantly solves all of these difficult and enduring challenges, but given the structure, remit and nature of the organisation, it is well positioned, certainly in a European context but possibly globally as well, to become a trusted broker of advice, guidance, capability and assurance of effective tools and methods for preservation.

JISC joined the OPF as a charter member in November 2010 so you might expect that we would approve of it and wish to sing its praises, but I do think it is significant that a group of UK university members has also had various conversations with the OPF and have decided that they would also like to collaborate with this initiative. The affiliate members that have recently joined are:

University of Southampton
University of Oxford
University of Portsmouth
University of Cambridge
King’s College London (Centre for e-Research)
University of Glasgow (Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute)
Digital Curation Centre

If any other UK universities (or associated bodies) are interested in joining this affiliate group then they should get in touch with either me (n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk), or Bram van der Werf (vanderwerfbram@gmail.com)

I believe rewards for better research information management are significant. By taking the friction out of reporting, universities can make genuine efficiency savings both of cash and time. Businesses and other potential partners can find out more about current research and can seek and find the researcher with the expertise they need. Researchers spend less time duplicating information in different systems, freeing them to get on with their real business: research.

In order to make the exchange and management of research information easier and more efficient, JISC has joined with the research councils, HEFCE, HESA, ARMA, UCISA and a number of universities, projects and companies to form the Research Information Management Group (RIMG).

The group has played a successful role in helping the sector to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. It has made the technical and business case for the adoption of a common research information standard, pointed the way to greater harmonisation of systems across the sector and created an opportunity for all the members of the group to come together behind a strategic vision.

JISC has taken forward a suite of projects which build on this vision. They have addressed many of the practical issues of improving research information management, from supporting researchers in their daily work to sharing large volumes of information between research partners and REF reporting. JISC infoNet has added its own research and case studies to the experience of these projects, built on the work of the RIMG and created a Research Information Management infoKit.

The infoKit is designed to provide senior managers with the key information they need to build better policies. It provides those tasked with procuring and evaluating systems with solid advice and gives staff who wish to implement better management and technical systems the benefit of a lot of hands-on experience.

But for me what is enjoyable about this work is that is it constantly evolving. The infoKit will be updated and adapted as the RIMG develops its vision and JISC projects create new tools and resources. It is already a valuable resource, but it will repay a fresh look now and again, as it grows and more value is added. Improved research information management strengthens all the partners in the world of research and JISC, by partnering with the RIMG and developing the infoKit is helping the UK to realise those benefits.

If you’re interested in our work in research information management find out more.

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In my role at JISC I look after our content programme which brings scholarly collections into the digital age – taking journals, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and other material and putting them on the web. I have the pleasure of working with many outstanding collections in the UK and have helped unearth some real treasures that can be shared and used for education and research.

The British Cartoon Archive is one such example. Hosted by the University of Kent, it represents a visual history of British history whether through the social comedies of Carl Giles or the political satire of Steve Bell. It provides the student with an alternative viewpoint on the century – not official documents, but a more slanted approach that provides a more accurate portrayal of public opinion. The video explains more.

The First World War Poetry archive, curated by the University of Oxford, is another astonishing collection. Incorporating the Great War Archive, where members of the general public where asked to submit images of objects relating to the war (letters, diaries, photos etc.), the resource is a seminal example of a crowd sourced website. The accompanying video tells some amazing stories that have been collected by the archive. In one story, we hear of a Scottish soldier, enlisted for war without the chance to say goodbye his family. He placed his goodbye message inside a matchbox and threw it onto the platform in the hope it would get to his loved ones. This video recounts the full story.

Most of the time I am looking at ways to promote these resources and create awareness amongst academics, researchers and learners that they exist. The JISC content site lists all the resources JISC has either funded or licensed for educational use. But one also needs to remember digitisation from the perspective of the creator, and the many things to take into account when putting collections online.

There are five pieces of advice that recent JISC funded projects have discovered have been crucial to successful digitisation projects.

Five top tips

1. Embedding digitisation within a university needs engagement, you need people on your side from across the whole of the organisation from researchers, academics and IT staff as well as senior management

2. Partnership is vital for those developing digitised content. Not just with other universities but with innovative publishers and producers

3. Digitised resources will achieve maximum impact when part of universities’ teaching and research strategies

4. Users love speed and convenience – one quick search over a federated website works better than multiple searches over disparate websites

5. Engaging external communities in digital content needs to be a two way process. It’s not just about universities broadcasting their expertise and exposing their digital content

I would like to consider one area affected by the financial challenges: digital content collections development. I would like to share with you some ways in which the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance can help you evaluate the financial standing of those important resources. As early as 2008, the Alliance commissioned Ithaka to address different aspects of the sustainability issue. Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources presented a framework for thinking about the mindsets and cultural factors needed to create sustainable resources and included a high-level survey of different revenue models that support digital content. In 2009 we commissioned the Ithaka  Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today. It took this approach a step further, examining in detail 12 digital content collections to understand how their leaders define and work towards sustainability, and drawing out the lessons other project leaders might apply to their own work. This included real figures giving the costs and income streams. Additional and supportive international research was also published in the Blue Ribbon on Sustaining Digital Preservation and Access in 2010.

As colleges and universities face increasingly tough choices on what to stop, start and continue in terms of provision of a range of activities to support their core missions, we have revisited and updated the twelve case studies. This will  show how their costs and income streams have been affected by the economic downturn and present the lessons learnt to help colleges and universities considering their options. It will contain real world examples of what is and isn’t working in terms of new emergent business models for digital content and collections. The preliminary findings will be showcased at JISC meeting rooms at Brettenham House in London on 17 March. Further information, including the registration details will be made available via the JISC website and Strategic Content Alliance blog shortly.

Just as we have considered how a college or university might weather the economic storm, we have thought about how funders might adopt good practice in developing their policies and practices in the future to help sustain their investments over the long term. So in 2010 we commissioned Ithaka to undertake research on how funders in Europe and North American are approaching the issues surrounding sustainability and taking the “best in class” practices develop a “tool-kit”. This will be published in April 2011. We hope that this research will support UK universities by allowing funders to identify good investments to help sustain not just digital content collections agencies such as JISC enhance its tactical and strategic approaches to help develop and sustain not just digital content collections, but other mission critical activities that are vital to UK college and university competitiveness globally.

So it is no surprise that there is by now a significant amount of good ‘stuff’ sitting on academic blogs in and around UK colleges and universities created by students, researchers, lecturers and others. But much of this material sits outside of institutional records, archives and information management systems.

If this information is not to be lost, copies of blogs need to be captured as records of business, institutional history and the deliberations of individuals. The UK Web Archive follows a practice of preserving blogs along with other websites, by harvesting their web versions in the form of HTML pages.

JISC is currently working on a low cost way to collect blog posts from across a college or university.  A JISC funded project at the University of London is looking at how to archive blogs by creating plug-ins for WordPress that will enable it to work as a blog archiving tool, allowing people to search and reuse the content from this central system. The project has also built a useful blog archiving bibliography

Despite the plethora of JISC blogs elsewhere we have now introduced a blog into our web presence for the first time. We hope that this will be the start of a new conversation, somewhere you will return to and hear from the people behind our work, that it will be a way to hear more informal voices and opinions talking about what we think, what we are working on, why we are doing what we are doing.

Come back and talk to us, comment on what we say, challenge us and use the comment facility here on the blog.