Establishing the JISC Digital Preservation Focus in June 2000 as a means of:
- Developing a long-term retention strategy for digital materials of relevance to HE/FE institutions in the UK
- Providing a UK focus for the development of practices, policies and strategies for the preservation of digital materials;
- Generating support and collaborative funding from and promoting inter-working with appropriate agencies worldwide.
The Joint Information Systems Committee approved the JISC Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy 2002-5 in September 2002 as a blueprint for its work (and in partnership with others), in digital preservation over the next three years. Copies of the Strategy will be supplied to prospective tenderers and an online version will also shortly be available on the JISC website. Some of the key initiatives in the implementation plan can be summarised as follows:
1. Establishing a Digital Curation Centre to:
- Provide a central focus of skilled staff and research, with links to a wider network of distributed development activity, researchers, and services for digital preservation;
- Develop a set of central services, standards, and tools for a range of distributed digital data centres and preservation services, across the Information Environment and Research Grid.
2. Development through RSLG of a national repository for the preservation of e-journals used by the community. Completion of the JISC e-journal archiving feasibility study commenced in April 2002 to support the scoping and implementation of this service.
3. Completion of a web-archiving feasibility study being jointly funded by JCIE and Wellcome Trust and development of web-archiving initiatives including a pilot Archive for JISC Project websites in 2002-3.
4. Completion of preservation risk and retention criteria assessments for all JISC funded content, during 2002-3.
5. Future calls in subsequent years to implement their recommendations for services, and integration of preservation activity and standards into repositories funded by JISC and others.
6. A series of community calls to support records management and digital preservation in institutions. This would focus initially on records management but increasingly focus on digital preservation in subsequent years.
To complete preservation risk and retention criteria assessments during 2002-3 and to inform and prioritise the development of future services and calls in digital preservation, the JISC is commissioning a number of feasibility studies as part of the implementation plan. Three such studies are already under way focussing on the archiving of e-journals, web-archiving, and e-science. This invitation to tender has been issued to commence a similar review for e-prints.
2.2 e-prints and the JISC Focus on Access to Information Resources (FAIR) programme
The Joint Information Systems Committee has funded recently a number of projects to support access to and sharing of institutional content within Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) and to allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical, organisational and cultural challenges of these processes. The Focus on Access to Information Resources (FAIR) programme will contribute to developing the mechanisms and supporting services to allow the submission and sharing of content generated by the HE/FE community. This programme is part of a broader area of development to build an Information Environment for the UK's Distributed National Electronic Resource.
The programme is inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) (http://www.openarchives.org), that digital resources can be shared between organisations based on a simple mechanism allowing metadata about those resources to be harvested into services. In the e-prints community this is realised through data providers who mount the e-prints (and who could be based in institutions, in subject groupings, or in some other way), and who disclose their metadata to a service provider, which again could be based in institutions, or could be subject based, regional, national or international. End users can either search the particular data provider of interest, if they know it, or can search the service provider, which will have gathered together the metadata from many data providers. The OAI protocol is one mechanism that can support this model, but there are others. The model can clearly be extended to include other kinds of objects, for example learning objects, images, video clips, finding aids, etc. The vision here is of a complex web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available through service providers to the whole community of learning.
Currently the best known and most heavily used e-print archives have been established in specific discipline based repositories but individual institutional repositories are also now being established focussing on e-prints and other institutional assets. The FAIR programme is one example of this.
3. Overview of preservation of e-prints
Although referred to as the "Open Archive Initiative" the ‘Archive’ of the OAI refers to the process of depositing articles, discovery, and promoting access (particularly pre-publication), rather than to archival custody as such and the process of their preservation in a long-term repository.
E-prints and institutional repositories are a new and high profile area for JISC and institutions. The initial focus has inevitably been on encouraging the deposit of e-prints and developing the OAI schema and tools both in the UK and internationally. However longer-term requirements will inevitably having some bearing on these emerging institutional repositories as they progress beyond the proof of concept and development stage. In order to analyse and scope future developments to support preservation in institutional repositories, JISC is now funding this study.
In the first instance there are a number of practical issues to address in terms of guidance on collection development and policy, which can be built into institutional collections policies and procedures.
One issue is the criteria for which material should or can be retained and for how long (in part this could be dependent on other issues such as eventual publication and IPR policy).
Another will be the data formats accepted or held (if different) by the repository as these affect longer-term costs and planning. There are a number of existing repositories and emerging guidelines on formats that could be relevant to this work. These include existing e-prints and e-theses repositories or preservation services handling similar file formats (for example the current preservation review in the Arts and Humanities Data Service which is providing guidance on a range of data formats for its services).
OAI metadata provides a metadata set suitable for supporting discovery but will also need addition of preservation metadata if long-term retention is to be supported. Preservation metadata has been considered in Cedars, NEDLIB, and National Library of Australia amongst others and a report considering and mapping the schema has recently been produced by a Research Libraries Group/OCLC working group.
In the medium to longer-term a number of possible scenarios could exist for developing preservation infrastructure for institutional repositories. Previous digital preservation research funded by JISC has explored models for distributed preservation of digital materials and the broad thrust of this work is supported by other preservation research internationally.
A major part of the JISC Strategy therefore is the establishment of a Digital Curation Centre to move recommendations from preservation research from proof of concept to production services and provide appropriate services and collaboration to support distributed preservation in institutions and national services. The call for the Centre will be issued in Spring 2004. The study will be expected to take account of the establishment of the Centre and its development path in its analysis and recommendations for future development of institutional repositories.
In developing preservation at an institutional level it is likely that the ‘Open Archival Information System’ (OAIS)Reference Model (http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/ref_model.html) will provide a foundation for guiding future developments. This provides a set of high level principles, functions, and common terminology for digital archives. Although it does not provide an implementation it is already a starting point for many leading initiatives. In the medium to long term e-print archive managers may well want to apply its principles in developing archive policy and procedures. Further development of OAIS implementation in the UK will be a major role for the Digital Curation Centre.
Another possible infrastructure scenario is that the long-term preservation could be supported by transfer/replication in a central national service(s). This will need careful consideration in the study of requirements and capacity of institutional repositories themselves, proposed support services available from the Digital Curation Centre, and exploration of transfer issues such as IPR and formats, and selection (what should /could be placed in a central repository and when), and the acquisition and transfer process from the perspective of central national services.
In any scenario consideration will need to be given to sustainability as preservation will require long-term commitments. Proposals will need to be scaleable over time to accommodate anticipated acquisition and development. The study will be expected to be informed by cost modelling in institutional repository projects eg Roquade (http://www.roquade.nl/ )or D-Space (http://www.dspace.org/ )and existing preservation services eg papers from the Digital Preservation Coalition October Forum (shortly to be available from www.dpconline.org). It is recognised that costs of long-term preservation remain difficult to quantify but there is a growing body of practical experience in services which can help isolate principal cost elements over the "lifecycle" of preservation.
4. Deliverables
The main deliverable from the proposed work is a consultant’s report, c 40-50 pages in length, which will address these issues under the following broad headings (specific example areas to be considered are provided for guidance).
a) Executive summary and recommendations
b) Introduction & background
c) Collections policies and procedures:
- Existing practices, procedures and documents
- Selection and retention criteria
- File formats
- Metadata
d) Infrastructure and future development needs:
- Development of institutional repositories
- Development of national services
- Sustainability
e) Conclusions
f) Proposed implementation plan
5. Methodology
It is important that the staff of institutional repositories and JISC services are able to make a contribution to this work. We would expect the successful tenderer to contact project staff in the FAIR programme and other repositories and services to draw on existing expertise and experience.
6. Timetable
The timetable for this work is:
- Tenders should be submitted to Neil Beagrie at JISC no later than Friday 22nd November 2002.
- A near final draft report is required by Friday 18 April 2003.
- The final report due by Tuesday 6th May taking into account feedback on the draft report.
7. Tendering process
All tender proposals must include the following information:
a) Details of the experience of the person or team tendering for the work. Tenders should identify clearly who would respectively manage and undertake the work.
b) An analysis demonstrating an understanding of the issues to be addressed and an outline of the methodology to be used.
c) A timetable of the proposed work, broken down into phases as appropriate.
d) A detailed breakdown of the total cost of the work, setting out clearly and in detail the basis on which this is calculated, including VAT (where charged) and any additional expenses. We have up to £25,000 gross available for this work.
Tenderers should send four hard copies and one electronic copy of their bid to Neil Beagrie no later than midday on Friday 22 November 2002. Tenders received after this time will not be accepted. Tenders must not exceed six sides of A4, excluding annexes. Facsimile and e-mail copies will not be accepted.
8. Evaluation
Proposals will be evaluated by referees. The following criteria will be used for evaluation purposes:
- demonstration of understanding of the issues (including technical);
- demonstration of ability to carry out the work required by the required deadline;
- the proposer’s experience and track record of carrying out similar work;
- sound methodology;
- appropriate use of resources.
9. Publication
This report will be circulated internally amongst committees and staff, and shared with other external organisations. The report should be delivered in an appropriate electronic format, to be agreed with the contractor. Proposers must be prepared to assign copyrights (including electronic) for the study outputs to JISC, or its nominee.
10. Steering group
The work will be overseen by a small project steering group appointed by JISC.
11. Payment
Payment will be 40% of the agreed contract figure on commencement, with payment of the remaining balance of 60% on approval of the final report by JISC.
12. Further Information
Neil Beagrie
JISC London Office
King's College London
Strand Bridge House
138-142 Strand
London WC2R 1HH
Email: preservation@jisc.ac.uk
Tel: 0709 204 8179