Here's an excerpt:

It is becoming common to archive research datasets that are not only large but also numerous. In addition, their corresponding metadata and the software required to analyse or display them need to be archived. Yet the manual curation of research data can be difficult and expensive, particularly in very large digital repositories, hence the importance of models and tools for automating digital curation tasks. The automation of these tasks faces three major challenges: (1) research data and data sources are highly heterogeneous, (2) future research needs are difficult to anticipate, (3) data is hard to index. To address these problems, we propose the Extract, Transform and Archive (ETA) model for managing and mechanizing the curation of research data. Specifically, we propose a scalable strategy for addressing the research-data problem, ranging from the extraction of legacy data to its long-term storage. We review some existing solutions and propose novel avenues of research.

| Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The University of North Texas Libraries and UNT's College of Information have received more than $800,000 in grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to address the challenges of curating and preserving digital information and new requirements from the National Science Foundation and other agencies that fund university research on long-term management of research data for possible review and use by future researchers and scholars.

Dr. William Moen, associate dean for research in UNT's College of Information, and Dr. Martin Halbert, dean of the UNT Libraries, successfully applied for two grants from IMLS' Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports efforts to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians and faculty members who prepare them for future careers, as well as supporting research related to library education and staffing needs, curriculum development and continuing education and training. . . .

The first grant of $624,663 from IMLS is for a three-year project to create four graduate-level courses in digital curation and data management. The first two courses will be taught during the summer of 2012. All four courses will be taught beginning in the summer of 2013, said Moen, the principal investigator for the grant. . . .

The second IMLS grant of $226,786 will fund a two-year investigation of the new roles, knowledge and skills that will be required of library and information science professionals to successfully manage research data cited in articles in scholarly journals — not just the publications.

UNT researchers, led by Halbert, will conduct two national surveys of officials at NSF and other funding agencies; college and university vice presidents for research and campus research officers; faculty of library and information science programs; academic librarians; campus IT managers; provosts and chief academic officers; and key researchers at universities and publishers of faculty research. The surveys will focus on college and universities' current data management plans, policies and practices; expectations and beliefs about data management; and preparation needed to archive data.

During the two years of the project, UNT researchers will also conduct focus groups in conjunction with several professional meetings. Personal interviews will be scheduled with selected individuals from the focus groups.

Read more about it at "Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program Grant Announcement June 2011."

| Digital Scholarship |

Here's an excerpt:

The aim of this white paper is to help universities and libraries implement policies and procedures in relation to e-journal archiving which can help support the move towards e-only provision of scholarly journals across the HE sector. The white paper is also contributing to complementary work JISC and other funders are commissioning on moving towards e-only provision of Journals.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A public consultation on access to, and preservation of, digital scientific information has been launched by the European Commission on the initiative of European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes and Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. European researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs must have easy and fast access to scientific information, to compete on an equal footing with their counterparts across the world. Modern digital infrastructures can play a key role in facilitating access. However, a number of challenges remain, such as high and rising subscription prices to scientific publications, an ever-growing volume of scientific data, and the need to select, curate and preserve research outputs. Open access, defined as free access to scholarly content over the Internet, can help address this. Scientists, research funding organisations, universities, and other interested parties are invited to send their contributions on how to improve access to scientific information. The consultation will run until 9 September 2011. . . .

Interested parties are invited to express their views on the following key science policy questions:

• how scientific articles could become more accessible to researchers and society at large
• how research data can be made widely available and how it could be re-used
• how permanent access to digital content can be ensured and what barriers are preventing the preservation of scientific output

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography | Google Books Bibliography | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

Here's an excerpt:

Digital preservation starts with detailed knowledge and awareness of your own content. The scope for content of institutional repositories has grown from research papers to presenting data supporting the research, also covering teaching materials, and artistic creativity. Four repositories representing each content type—the exemplars—joined the KeepIt project to investigate how effectively each could support the goals of a general repository: trustworthy storage, and preservation. This final report from the project reveals the results, outcomes and implications of the work.

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt:

This report gives an overview about research on digital preservation throughout projects sponsored by the European Commission as part of the sixth and seventh framework programmes for research and technological development. It summarises the objectives, developments, similarities and differences as well as accomplishments and results of these projects. The report also considers research agendas in the field of digital preservation and identifies challenges for the future.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt:

File format identification, characterization, and validation are considered essential processes for digital preservation and, by extension, long-term data curation. These actions are performed on data objects by humans or computers, in an attempt to identify the type of a given file, derive characterizing information that is specific to the file, and validate that the given file conforms to its type specification. The present research reviews the literature surrounding these digital preservation activities, including their theoretical basis and the publications that accompanied the formal release of tools and services designed in response to their theoretical foundation. It also reports the results from extensive tests designed to evaluate the coverage of some of the software tools developed to perform file format identification, characterization, and validation actions. Tests of these tools demonstrate that more work is needed – particularly in terms of scalable solutions – to address the expanse of digital data to be preserved and curated. The breadth of file types these tools are anticipated to handle is so great as to call into question whether a scalable solution is feasible, and, more broadly, whether such efforts will offer a meaningful return on investment. Also, these tools, which serve to provide a type of baseline reading of a file in a repository, can be easily tricked. It is possible to generate files with nothing more than a proper file extension and correct magic number and have the tools "positively" identify the file. This is not the same as a file that conforms to its specification, and one that could be considered valid. The ability to manipulate the results returned by these tools raises issues of identity, trust, security and risk.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Many people want to keep their digital photographs, videos and other files as long-term personal and family memories. This is a fairly new challenge, as until recently most personal documentation was in a hard copy or other analog format. . . .

NDIIPP staff member Bill LeFurgy drew from the program's personal digital archiving guidance in providing practical tips for identifying, selecting, organizing and storing personal digital collections. Over 500 organizations and individuals participated in the webinar, which was held as part of national Preservation Week.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

To support researchers in producing high quality research data for long-term use, the UK Data Archive has revised and expanded its popular and highly cited Managing and Sharing Data: best practice for researchers, first published in 2009.

The new third edition is 36 pages covering:

• why and how to share research data
• data management planning and costing
• documenting data
• formatting data
• storing data
• ethics and consent issues
• data copyright
• data management strategies for large investments

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the document:

This policy framework sets out EPSRC's expectations concerning the management and provision of access to EPSRC-funded research data. EPSRC recognises that a range of institutional policies and practices can satisfy these expectations, and encourages research organisations to develop specific approaches which, while aligned with EPSRC's expectations, are appropriate to their own structures and cultures.

The expectations arise from seven core principles which align with the core RCUK principles on data sharing. Two of the principles are of particular importance: firstly, that publicly funded research data should generally be made as widely and freely available as possible in a timely and responsible manner; and, secondly, that the research process should not be damaged by the inappropriate release of such data.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This report provides a vivid glimpse inside the workplaces that produce what – not long ago – we would have called newspapers. As digital news-gathering and production methods proliferate, and as digital avenues for distribution emerge, these workplaces are being transformed in profound ways, with electronic facsimiles and websites (and probably more) overtaking the paper format.

The report is an outgrowth of the Preserving Digital News meeting held at the Library in September 2009, and it features illustrative examples from four American newspapers: The Arizona Republic, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (since 2008, seattlepi.com), Wisconsin State Journal, and The Chicago Tribune. There is additional information pertaining to the work of The New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and the Associated Press. Altogether, the report makes it clear that the transition to the digital environment is not a neat, throw-the-switch change.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt:

The stated aim of many repositories is to provide permanent open access to their content. However, relatively few repositories have implemented practical action plans towards permanence. Repository managers often lack time and confidence to tackle the important but scary problem of preservation.

Written by, and aimed at, repository managers, this paper describes how the JISC-funded KeepIt project has been bringing together existing preservation tools and services with appropriate training and advice to enable repository managers to formulate practical and achievable preservation plans.

Three elements of the KeepIt project are described:

1. The initial, exploratory phase in which repository managers and a preservation specialist established the current status of each repository and its preservation objectives;
2. The repository-specific KeepIt preservation training course which covered the organisational and financial framework of repository preservation; metadata; the new preservation tools; and issues of trust between repository, users and services;
3. The application of tools and lessons learned from the training course to four exemplar repositories and the impact that this has made.

The paper concludes by recommending practical steps that all repository managers may take to ensure their repositories are preservation-ready.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

Here's an excerpt:

The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group has completed its fourth annual investigation of link rot among the original URLs for online law- and policy-related materials archived though the group's efforts.

The Chesapeake Group focuses primarily on the preservation of Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time. In the four years since the program began, the Chesapeake Group has built a digital archive collection comprising more than 7,400 digital items and 3,200 titles, all of which were originally posted to the Web.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This release supports all the major technical objectives of the project, including a more sophisticated, modular architecture; signature-based file identification; policy-based assessment of objects; recursive characterization of objects comprising aggregate files and files arbitrarily nested in containers; and extensive configuration and reporting options. It provides a stabile interface against which developers can code new format modules.

Format modules included in this release are:

• ICC color profiles
• SGML
• Shapefile
• TIFF
• UTF-8
• WAVE
• XML
• Zip

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Here's an excerpt:

In one response to this need to develop models of digital preservation, the NEH and IMLS awarded a grant to Portico, in partnership with Cornell University Library, through the "Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership grant program" to develop a practical model for how preservation can be accomplished for digitized books. Through this initiative and other efforts, Portico had the opportunity to discuss digital collections and their long-term preservation with 27 cultural heritage organizations. In addition, Cornell University Library provided significant samples of content to analyze. Out of this research and the extensive experience in preservation at both Portico and Cornell University Library, we developed a model for the preservation of digitized books and other "document like" digital content at cultural heritage organizations.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |