IDCC14 notes, day 1: 4c project workshop

Part 1 in a series of notes on IDCC 2014, the 9th International Digital Curation Conference, held San Francisco, 24-27 feb.

In stark contrast with the 'European' 2013 edition, held last year in my hometown Amsterdam, at this IDCC over 80% of the attendees were from the US. That’s what you get with a west coast location, and unfortunately it was not made up by more delegates from Asia and down under. However as the conference progressed it became clear that despite the vast differences in organisation and culture, we’re all running into the same problems.

IDCC 2014 Day 1: pre-conference workshop on 4C project

4cproject.eu is an EU financed project to make a inventory of the costs of curation (archiving, stewardship, digital permanence etc.) With a 2 year project span it’s relatively short. The main results will be a series reports, a framework for analysis (based on risk management) and the ‘curation cost exchange’, a website where (anonimized) budgets can be compared.
The project held a one-day pre-conference workshop “4C - are we on the right track?” at which a roadmap and some intermediate results were presented, mixed with more interactive sessions for feedback from the participants. It didn’t always work (the schedule was tight) but still it was a day full of interesting discussions.
Neil Grindley noted that since the start of the project the goal has shifted from “just helping people calculate the cost” to a wider context. Beyond the actual cost (model) of curation: also the context, risks management, benefits and ROI. ROI is especially important for influencing decision makers, given the limited resources.

d3-1 - evaluation of cost models and needs gaps analysis draft

Cost models

Cost models are difficult to compare and hard to do. Top topics of interest: risks/trustworthiness, sustainability and data protection issues. Some organizations are unable or unwilling to share budgets. Special praise was given to the Dutch Royal Library (KB) for being a very open organisation for disclosing their business costs.
The exponential drop of storage costs has stopped. The rate has fallen from 30-40% to at most 12%. It is impossible to calculate costs for indefinite storage. This lead to a remark from the audience: "we're just as guilty as the researchers really, our horizon is the finish of the project.” We have to use different time scales - you have to have some short time benefits, but also keep the long term in scope.
However, costs are much more than storage. Rule of a thumb: 1/2 ingest, 1/3 storage, 1/6 access. Preservation and access are not necessarily linked. Example is the LOC twitter archive which they keep on tape. Once (if) legal issues currently prohibiting opening this archive are resolved, access might be possible via amazon’s 'open data sets' where you pay for acces by using EC2. The economics work because amazon keeps it on non-presistent media and provides access, and LOC keeps it on persistent media but no access.

Other misc notes

A detailed mockup of the cost exchange website was demoed and if all the functionality can be realized, this may be a very useful resource.

The workshop included a primer on professional risk management, based on ISO 31000 standard. “Just read this standard, it's not very boring!”. Originally from engineering, risk management is now considered mature for other fields as well. 

German Nestor project, really clear definitions on what a repository is, a useful resource comparable to the JISC reports:
www.crl.edu/focus/article/394
www.langzeitarchivierung.de/Subsites/nestor/DE/Home/home_node.html

Open Planets Foundation - great tools.

CDL DataShare is online - a really nice, clean interface.

OR11: Misc notes

I like going to conferences alone, it’s much easier to meet new people from all over the world than when you’re with a group, groups tend to cling together. With a multitracking conference like OR11 however, the downside is that there’s so much to miss. Especially since I like to check out sessions from fields I’m not familiar with. At OR11, I wanted to take the pulse of DSpace and Eprints, and not just faithfully stick with the Fedora talks.

In this entry, I focus on bits and bobs I found noteworthy, rather than give a complete description. I skip over sessions that were excellent but have already widely covered elsewhere (for instance at library jester) such as Clifford Lynch closing plenary.


“Sheer Curation” of Experiments: data, process and provenance, Mark Hedges 
slides [pdf]

"Sheer curation" is meant to be lightweight, with curation quietly integrated in the normal workflow. The scientific process is complex with many intermediate steps that are discarded. The deposit at the end approach misses these. Goal of this JISC project is to capture provenance experimental structure. It follows up on Scarp (2007-2009).

I really liked the pragmatic approach (I've written this sentence often - I really like pragmatism!). As the researchers tend to work on a single machine and heavily use the file system hierarchy, they wrote a program that runs as a background process on the scientists’ computer. Quite a lot of metadata can be captured from log files, headers, filenames. Notably, it also helps that much work on metadata and vocabulary has already been done in the field in the form of limited practices and standards.

Being pragmatic also means discarding nice-to-haves such as persistent identifiers. That would require the researchers to standardise beyond their own computer and that’s asking too much.

The final lesson learned sounded familiar: it took more, much more time than anticipated to find out what it is the researchers really want.


SWORD v2

SWORD2: looks promising and useful, and actually rather simple. Keeping the S was a design constraint. Hey, otherwise we’d end up with Word, and one is more than enough!

Version 2 will do full Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD). Though a service can always be configured to deny a certain actions. It’s modelled on Google’s Gdata and makes an elegant use of Resource Maps and dedicated action URLs.

CottageLabs, one of the design partners, made a really introduction video to Sword v2 demonstrating how it works:





It looks really useful and indeed still easy (as per Einstein's famous quip, as simple as possible but not simpler). If you’re a techie, dive into SwordApp.org. If you’re not, just add Sword compliance to your project requirements!


Ethicshare & Humbox, two sessions on community building

Two examples of successful subject-oriented communities that feature a repository, each with some good ideas to nick.

Ethicshare is a community repository that aggregates social features for bioethics:

• one of the project partners is a computer scientist who studies social communities. Because of this mutual interest (for the programmer it’s more than just a job) they have had the resources to fine tune the site.
• the field has a strong professional society that they closely work with.
• glitches at beginning were a strong deterrent to success - so yes, release early and often, but not with crippling bugs!
• the most popular feature is a folder for gathering links, and many people choose to make them public (it’s private by default).
• before offering it to the whole site, new features are tried out on a small, active group of around 30 testers.
• for the next grant phase they needed more users quickly, so they bought ads. $300 for Facebook ads yielded for 500 clickthroughs, $2000 Google ads 5000. This (likely) contributed to number of unique visitors rising from 4k to 20k per month. Tentative conclusion: these ads cost relatively little and are effective for such a specialized subject, the targeting is really quite good.

Lessons from the UK based Humbox project:

• approach: analyse what scientists were doing already in real life, in paper and file cabinets, mimic it and extend it.
• "the repository is not about research papers, it is about the people who write them": the profile page is the heart, putting the user at the centre. Like Facebook’s, it has two distinct views: an outside version about you (to show off), and internal version for you (with your interests). This reminds me of the success of the original, pre-yahoo delicious, which also cleverly put self-interest first with the social sharing as a side-effect.
• Find a need that's not covered by existing systems: Humbox fills a need to share stuff, not just with students - for that the LCMS is the natural place to go to - but with colleagues, since the course-centric nature of LCMS’s tends to lock colleagues out.
• Most feedback came from community workshops. Participants often became local evangelists.
• Comments often were corrections. 60% of the authors changed a resource after a comment - and the 40% comments not leading to a correction also include positives, so the attitude towards criticism was quite positive.
• over 50% of users modified or augmented material from others, sometimes reuploading it to the site.
• Humbox only takes Creative Commons licenses, with an educational side-effect: some users indicated they also started looking in other places (such as flickr) for cc material as a result.

The Learning Registry: “Social Networking for Metadata”
slides [google docs]

I just want to mention this for the sheer scope and size of this initiative. It’s [explicative] ambitious.

The aim to gather all social networking metadata! To limit the scope, they won’t do normalising, or offer search or a query api, that's all left to the users of the gathered dataset. But all, they mean everything on the net: data, metadata and paradata (by which I understand they mean the relationships with other data).

Agreements are in the works with major partners (see last slide). The big elephant in the room was Facebook (no surprise, sigh) which wasn’t mentioned at all. (as I'm writing this, Google+ has just been announced, there is some hope after all of the slightly creepy evil eventually triumphing over the even more evil).

They call their approach a do-ocracy. Very agile design principles. Real-time everything in the open: all code and specs are written directly in Google Docs (table of contents, a google spreadsheet). NoSQL master-master storage system, well thought-out architecture, production will run on ec2. Everything will be open, except data harvested from commercial partners.

Something to keep an eye on: www.learningregistry.org.




Finally...


MODS is the new DC. In recent projects, MODS seems to have replaced Dublin Core as the baseline standard for metadata exchange. Interesting development.

OR09: NSF Datanet-curating scientific data

Open Repositories 2009, Day 1, session 3. NSF Datanet-curating scientif data, John Kunze and Sayeed Choudhury.

The first non-split plenary (why a large part of the first two days consisted of 'split plenaries' baffled me, and I was not the only one).

Two speakers, two approaches. First John Kunze from UCDL, focussing in the microlevel with a strategy of keeping it simple. "Imagining the non-repository", "avoid the deadly embrace" of tight standards: decouple by design, lower the barrier of entry.

One of the ways to accomplish this is by staying lo-tech: instead of fullblown database systems, use a plain file system and naming conventions: pairtree. I really like this approach. I've worked in large digitization projects with third parties delivering content on harddisks. They bulk at databases and complicated metadata schemes, but this might just be doable for them. Good stuff.

CDL has a whole set of curation microsystems, as they call it. I'm going to keep an eye out for this.

The second talk, by Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins), focussed on the macro level of data conservancy. This was more abstract, and he started out with the admission that "we don’t have the answers, there are unsolved unknowns - otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten that NSF grant".

Interesting: one of the partner institutions (not funded by NSF) is Zoom Intelligence – a venture capital firm, interested in creating software services on research data. First VS's bought into ILS, now they pop up here... we must be doing something right!

Otherwise, the talk was mostly abstract and longer term strategy.