2. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Foundational perspectives
Digital Libraries, focus on:
Technical aspect of sustainability
Project management and financial sustainability
Data interoperability
Data and Metadata sustainability plan
RI literature, focus depends on perspective
Focus on Organisation or Business Model (Ithaka)
Focus on Technical Infrastructure (DARIAH DE)
Communication and branding (LAIRAH)
3. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Defining Sustainability for CENDARI
CENDARI was a multi-partner Research Infrastructure project
funded under the European Commission’s 7th Framework
Programme
New Paradigm:
Sustainability as a process rather than a state
Goal of sustainability is transformation and reuse
Focus on reuse value within several asset classes
Outcome: a toolkit for the sustainability of the CENDARI
project and its infrastructure based on recognition of the
complexity of theproject results (not just the portal)
cendari.eu
4. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Sustainability as Planning and Process within CENDARI
Foundational relationship with DARIAH (concretised in 2013 MOU):
“DARIAH is your Sustainability Plan"
18 month-long sustainability planning exercise (stakeholders
meeting in Jan. 2015)
Modular approach to sustainability
Complexity and richness of the tacit knowledge held by the project
team
5. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Recommendations on Process
- Start early and build sustainability in (4 points
in time)
- Reuse wherever possible (knowledge,
standards, data, code) and be open for
reuse/handover
- Know your knowledge and share it well
- Build in appropriate data management
planning
- Think of a 3-5 year window, be ‘evolving and
involving’
6. PARTHENOS-project.eu
The CENDARI assets
- Tangible Assets: data, archival research guides, publications
- Intangible Assets: processes, best practice, know how,
communities
→ Categories of assets:
- Technical Infrastructure: Portal, Services and Tools
- Research Data: Unique and Aggregated
- Publications and Knowledge: ARGs, Toolkits, Knowhow,
Management Data and Assets.
- Communities: People, Networks and Relationships
7. PARTHENOS-project.eu
The CENDARI Technical Infrastructure (Portal, Services,
Tools)
- Portal: University of Gottingen (DARIAH-DE) for 3
years, following full audit of final state and exit plan
in case of failure/removal of any key component
- Virtual Machine: Available as a full ‘CENDARI-in-
a-box’ installation for reuse
- Tools and Services: Some with independent front
doors, code available on GitHub to share software
8. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Recommendations for the sustainability of the technical
infrastructure
- Identify a partner (or a group of partners)
responsible for the maintenance of basic
services after the end of the project
- Have a realistic expectation for how long
software will remain useful if not under active
development
- Design the infrastructure in a way that the single
elements can be reused and implemented by
other research infrastructures
- Technical documentation of the tools and their
integration should be openly available
9. PARTHENOS-project.eu
CENDARI Data: Unique and Aggregated
The CENDARI “Data Soup”
- Data aggregated from Institutions (API, FTE, OAI
PMH et al)!
- CENDARI is not a digital library (BUT we
needed Libraries’ and Archives’ Trust)
- Data created by CENDARI Researchers (‘RWP’
protocol for ‘hidden’ collections)
- Researcher notes and uploads in the NTE
- Ontologies and other Linked Data resources
10. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Recommendations for the sustainability of Research
Data
- As before: use standards and open formats, reuse
previous work, and find a partner to continue
development (DARIAH, PARTHENOS), document
work
- Share unique data widely, with your users (eg
ontologies) and collaborators (if possible!)
- Build robust social structures (eg documented use
policies) to build trust
- Design a data ingestion cycle that is capable of
being rolled out as an easily managed service at
project close
- Be clear about what you have collected your data
for, and what it’s value is (and for whom)
11. PARTHENOS-project.eu
CENDARI Publications and Knowledge
- Publications (external support), Training material (project
website), Management Data (internal support), etc. - not a
problem
- CENDARI Archival Research Guides: COMPLEX
OBJECTS: comprise text, images, annotated entities, links,
available in 3 formats (NTE, RDFA-XML and edited PDF)
- Tacit Knowledge, including project failures: an asset most
often lost at project close
12. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Recommendations for the sustainability of project
knowledge capital
- Ensure that research work can be accessed
reliably (PI) in a variety of easy to find, relevant
formats and locations (including TDR or traditional
journal)
- Where publications challenge community norms,
seek external validation for them (peer review,
consultation)
- Build in a ‘Tacit Knowledge Audit’ process to the
project and publish appropriately around this
- As before: connect directly for reuse (eg. DARIAH
Teach)
- Ensure that management data, teaching resources,
etc. are included in your data management plan
13. PARTHENOS-project.eu
CENDARI’s Communities and Networks
Your reach may be bigger than you
know...
- DARIAH and other RIs
(PARTHENOS)
- Funded Project Partners
- Scholarly Networks (IMC,
ISFWWS, COST 1005, etc.)
- CHIs and their networks (APE
Foundation, Europeana, CERL,
individual institutions)
- Social Media networks
- Users
Pic from launch?
From early
PDMs?
14. PARTHENOS-project.eu
Recommendations for the sustainability the user
community
- Maintain a consistent central communication point,
even after active project close
- Find a context or platform that fosters continued
engagement and communications (DARIAH Working
Group), and a small group of generalists willing to
continue development toward a possible new phase
- Provide to the end users with simple instruments or
forms to contact the project's team, to add content,
report bugs and query usage of tools
Pic from launch?
From early
PDMs?
Digital Libraries (DL) have the longest tradition in the preservation of digital objects
DOCUMENTS:
Document by Council on Library and Information Resources, 2003: factors that need to be considered when discussing sustainability, elements she characterised as ‘threats’ to the development, such as continuity of funding, data preservation (including choice of standards and longevity of data) and flexibility to change business models.
Document by: University of North Texas Library, 2002: proposes steps to be taken for a healthy data sustainability plan: Life Cycle Assessment of the Digital Resources, Draft of a metadata architecture, Metadata Creation Workflow; Metadata Creation Tools
Document by: IFLA DL Manifesto = focuses on the interoperability of data and metadata
EDM example on interoperability
CENDARI’s view to sustainability draws from the existing literature and the projects previously described
This new paradigm follows a hybrid approach that seeks to understand the many facets of what the project has created, understand their value for current and future user groups, and sustain those elements in one or more formats that will best allow them to connect with their users.
Sustainability as a process rather than a state, which begins with project conceptualisation and ends far after project close
it views the end goal of sustainability not as stasis, but as transformation, and reuse
Project as a collection of tangible and intangible assets with potential value to other users.
It was felt at the outset of the project that sustainability for the project outputs would not be an issue, and that our close relationship with DARIAH-ERIC would guarantee that our results would be maintained.
But a complex technical infrastructure cannot simply be frozen in time and expected to continue to meet evolving needs. For this reason, the plan that follows is based upon a multidimensional conceptualisation of what CENDARI is and the value of its assets, as well as on the fundamental understanding of a digital project as useless if it does not ‘evolve and involve.’
Memorandum of Understanding between CENDARI and DARIAH, outlining their complimentary roles and DARIAH’s commitment to maintaining what CENDARI would build: driven by recurrent queries from data providers we were approaching regarding whether their data would continue to be available after January 2016
18 month-long sustainability planning exercise (July 2014 through January 2016): set of principles and processes for mapping and sustaining user value from a project for the medium and long terms were discussed, and number of key actions were identified as key enablers for the planning, development and conclusion of digital projects, in particular for projects affiliated to DARIAH
REFERENCE: Joris Van Zundert, “fluidity” of research infrastructure, caught up in both the digital information lifecycle and the creation of knowledge by end users, as well as the software components
3. Modular approach to sustainability: reuse within one community might require a different form of access than would be appropriate in another
Identification of the CENDARI assets
7 categories of assets: one of the greatest challenges of the CENDARI sustainability planning process to ensure that for each of these areas we could find a solution, as we would for our personal work data, to make them findable and reusable in a contextualised manner, and preserve them in ‘multiple formats and multiple locations.
1. PORTAL: is the most visible of its assets, representing the final synthesis of the project’s activities and its main point of access. For many projects, this would be where sustainability planning would not only begin, but end.
2. SERVICES, TOOLS AND COMPONENTS: a very modular, service oriented architecture was adopted for the project. The tools therefore require a sustainability pathway outside of the portal.
3. DATA: The CENDARI data portal gives access to this data, and the project’s data agreement and license have been developed with DARIAH as a cosignatory, so in many ways DARIAH had already agreed from an early point in the project to sustain this data. But DARIAH is not well known as a data provider or source,
Physical home: University of Gottingen (DARIAH-DE) - for 3 years. Within this time, new user communities will be recruited to take on the continued development of the system,
GitHub: to share software, but this only will impact the developer, rather than the potential end user
Role of the CENDARI sustain working group (liaise with DARIAH ERIC over time; possibility to create a registry)
Software as a Service (SaaS)-based architecture, maintaining the portal and services for CENDARI requires commitments to a number of very different components
Notes Taking Environment: This component would be one of the greatest concerns due to its complexity, but also because the partner that developed will not be continuing association with the CENDARI SUSTAIN WG (as will MISANU and UGOE).
The variety of cultural heritage institutions is one of the biggest assets of the project: from local Archives to Pan European aggregation projects
Small, local archives: little investments in metadata standardization and data storage
National Archives and International Archives: advanced in technical infrastructure but often lack policy framework to share their data
Pan-European Aggregtaors: advanced in terms of data-sharing protocols and applications, such as APIs and OAI-PMH
→ White Book of Archives
→ Ensuring traceability, redundancy and authority for research publications
sustainability highly dependant on the NTE → how can the ARG be published through other channels as scholarly publication?
Exportable as RDFA-XML
Medieval and Modern guides will be published as electronic publications by the Freie University and SISMEL
Publication in traditional historical journals
The Archival Research Guides create connections across archival collections with contextualized analysis and related information.
Entry points into the CENDARI resources, as well as to some of the transnational topics that will be of interest to CENDARI users, guiding them to different content and through the application of the tools and services available within the Virtual Research Environment (VRE); access to transnational historiographical themes (some examples: Private Memories of the WW1; Jews of Eastern Europe; Worker’s movements during the ww1)
They also exemplify the enhancement of the traditional methods of historical research provided by the project.
COMPLEXT OBJECTS: Comprise text, images, annotated entities, links
the entire sustainability of the CENDARI research infrastructure depends on its use by historians, developers and other researchers: without this, the whole research infrastructure has very little reason to be supported and sustained.
→ Basic continuity of Communication: the main portal and the general email address will continue to work
→ CENDARI SUSTAIN WORKING GROUP: - a core of the CENDARI leaders will contribute to the WG over the course of three years
The actions of the CENDARI Sustain are twofold: on the one hand it will make sure that the CENDARI users will be granted access to the CENDARI Research Infrastructure as well as to the main CENDARI website. On the other hand it commits to maintain and to extend the community of users that CENDARI has created in the last years of activity.