JISC

The overall aim of this programme strand is to build the business case for preservation and to continue to embed preservation practice into institutions. The projects listed below will contribute to the aims of the programme strand in different ways. The level of JISC investment into this work is £425k over 2 years. Institutional contributions increase the total investment to around £705k.

i) JISC Digital Preservation Support and Enabling Project (Nov 2011 - Oct 2013)

SPRUCE - Sustainable Preservation Using Community Engagement

• Led by: University of Leeds
• Project Director: Bo Middleton 
• Partners: The British Library, Digital Preservation Coalition, London School of Economics, Open Planets Foundation

This project will lead and co-ordinate the work in this strand and is funded to act in a 'support and enabling' role to help the UK F/HE community to undertake practical preservation tasks and to gather case study information for inclusion into an evidence-base that will underpin the business case for digital preservation.

The SPRUCE Project will inspire, guide, support and enable UK HEI’s to address preservation gaps; and to use the knowledge gathered from that support work to articulate a compelling business case for digital preservation. The Project will be led by Leeds University Library who will provide evidencegathering expertise and event management. The four partners will collaborate to develop a strategy for engaging the academic community and will also contribute technical expertise. Project work will build on the recent JISC funded AQuA Project (led by Leeds University Library) and will use an event driven approach to providing support and expertise whilst compiling evidence to help understand the costs and benefits of undertaking digital preservation. Leeds and project partners will bring significant experience and expertise to this project, thereby ensuring that its outputs are well articulated and directly beneficial to our home institutions, and also widely valuable across the HE/FE sector.

 ii) Active Digital Preservation Case Study Projects (Nov 2011 - Feb 2012)

 Carcanet - Carcanet Email Preservation Project

• Led by: John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester
• Primary contact: Sandra Bracegirdle

The University of Manchester currently holds the print archives of the Carcanet Press, one of the UK’s premier poetry publishing houses. This project will establish best practice to ingest and preserve the digital archives of the Carcanet Press using the email archive as a case study.

The Digital Directorate - Digital Preservation of Governance Records at the Institute of Education

• Led by: Institute of Education, University of London
• Primary contact: Sarah Aitchison

Using the Institute of Education Directorate (the central administrative department, which produces most of the high-level governance and strategic planning records) as a case study, this project will explore existing digital records management practice and create relevant documentation which can be used to develop an institutional digital preservation strategy.

Future Proofing - Enabling Practical Preservation of Born-Digital Records

• Led by: University of London Computer Centre
• Primary contact: Ed Pinsent

Our funded case study proposes a simple toolkit of services and software that can plug intoa network drive and create preservation copies of core business documents that requirepermanent preservation. It is a simple intervention which makes use of open sourcemigration and validation tools, such as those formerly available in the PLANETS testbed andnow available through the Open Planets Foundation and SourceForge; or the DigitalPreservation Software Platform at the National Archives of Australia. The case study willseek to demonstrate the viability of this approach. It represents a new approach to using aform of IT (file servers) in which ULCC already has significant knowledge, expertise andinvestment and combines it with ULCC's skills and understanding of digital preservation.Our proposal is a low-cost, practical solution that addresses immediate preservationproblems, makes use of available open source tools, and requires minimal IT support. Iffound to be a viable approach, the results of the case study can feasibly be used by otherInstitutions facing similar difficulties, and scaled up to apply to the preservation of other and more complex digital objects.

POPE - Preserving Official Publications in Education

• Led by: Institute of Education, University of London
• Primary contact: Bernard Scaife

This project aims to preserve UK government publications which are currently linked to via the library catalogue and are disappearing from the Web, in order to support research into education between 1990 and 2010.

POPS - Publishing Online to Preserve Scholarship

• Led by: University of Central Lancashire
• Primary contact: Helen Cooper

This project will apply state of the art digital preservation standards and processes to existing online publications and to provide an easy-to-use template to inspire new ones. The project will bring the principles of the open access movement together with the robust governance and preservation procedures to ensure the capture and preservation of scholarly output without hindering the energy of the burgeoning scholarly effort at UCLan using online publication platforms and innovative publication models. The project will seek to apply existing solutions and standards to meet the publishing needs of academics at UCLan. Part of the project will be to identify these needs and concerns and provide a toolkit and series of case studies to enable them to take advantage offered by the respository overlay model of scholarly publishing quickly and easily, within a supported environment.

iii) Enhancing Digital Preservation Capability Within Institutions (Nov 2011 - July 2012)

DataSafe - DataSafe

• Led by: University of Bristol
• Primary contact: Debra Hiom

The DataSafe project will allow the development of our existing IT training process. While this training provision is well embedded within the University and open to all staff (and many students), the area of data management is currently under-represented. DateSafe will consist of two x 1 day training days and a project website with guidance. Our target audience is university support staff.

DICE - Digital Communications Enhancement

• Led by: London School of Economics
• Primary contact: Ed Fay

The DICE project will produce training materials designed to raise awareness of digital preservation in two key audiences: LSE Library information management training providers, and academic and PhD student participants in that training. The materials will be designed to be reusable in other institutions with similar digital preservation capacity and training provision. The materials will be piloted in face-to-face consultations with members of the academic and PhD student audiences, and in a formal information literacy programme offered in collaboration with the Methodology Institute at LSE.

PrePARe - Preservation: Promoting Awareness to Researchers

• Led by: University of Cambridge
• Primary contact: Elin Stangeland

With the PrePARe project, we aim to improve the digital preservation and information management skills of the academic community at the University of Cambridge. It will allow us to build upon the outputs from previous projects relating to the digital lifecycle, such as Incremental, DataTrain and EPIC. Throughout the project, we will engage closely with the academic community in Cambridge, to ensure that the advice and resources we provide are aligned with their needs and delivered in the most appropriate formats.

SHARD - Preservation of Historical Research Data

• Led by: University of London Computer Centre
• Primary contact: Patricia Sleeman

The creation of training materials for digital preservation for the historical research community at the Institute of Historical Research, with a view to embedding a process for preservation in the entire University of London. The content will be integrated with existing postgraduate research training courses at the IHR. The materials will take the form of elearning materials which can be shared, used and adapted by other educational Institutes and made applicable to a range of academic disciplines. The results will be validated by IHR's Research Training Group.