The document discusses the challenges and recommendations for economically sustainable digital preservation in Europe, focusing on various stakeholders including libraries, publishers, and researchers. Key points include the need for developing selection criteria for digital content, establishing funding mechanisms for preservation, and addressing legal and governance issues. The document also highlights several case studies estimating costs and emphasizes the importance of creating sustainable infrastructure for long-term access to digital materials.

1. Digital Preservation Activity:
Issues for the creation of a digital
Europe
Dr Paul Ayris
Director of UCL Library Services and UCL Copyright Officer
President of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries)
p.ayris@ucl.ac.uk

2. Contents
1. The European Information Landscape
2. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
3. LIBER and APARSEN
4. LIFE project on digital preservation costing
5. Next Steps
 European Infrastructures
6. Conclusions

3. Contents
1. The European Information Landscape
2. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
3. LIBER and APARSEN
4. LIFE project on digital preservation costing
5. Next Steps
 European Infrastructures
6. Conclusions

4. Local
VRE/VLE/ Student/UCL Library Prescribed core readings holdings
local web systems and textbooks Paper and e-
Research collaborations; Pay fees; book residences;
Books/Journals/
Primary data; Group pay fines; see course and Core textbooks (STM);
AV/Digital Collections
project work; Learning exam marks; see loans Digital readings (AHSS)
and Archives
interface information
E-Journals, E-Books,
YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr Global resources - free
mass digitisation
Digital
Preservation
Google interface to External content
Social networking tools
Internet subscribed and free

5. Contents
1. The European Information Landscape
2. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
3. LIBER and APARSEN
4. LIFE project on digital preservation costing
5. Next Steps
 European Infrastructures
6. Conclusions

6. Digital Preservation
 US-UK Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable Digital
Preservation laid out the conditions that should prevail in order for
the scholarly outputs of researchers to be digitally preserved for the
long term
 See http://www.jisc.ac.uk/brtf
 A number of scenarios looked at the level of preparation of various
communities to undertake digital preservation
 Scholarly Discourse
 Research Data
 Commercially-owned Cultural Content
 Collectively-produced Web Content

7. Digital Preservation
 Academic libraries were amongst the best prepared of
the stakeholders surveyed
 US Film Industry, by contrast, was not
 Jon Landau, the producer of Avatar, was honest in saying that no
arrangements had been made for the digital preservation of his
film
 Not clear whose responsibility to undertake that work it was

8. Digital Preservation
 Economically-sustainable digital preservation requires:
 Recognition of the benefits of digital preservation on the part of
key decision-makers
 Incentives for the decision-makers to act in the public interest
 A process for selecting digital materials for long-term
preservation
 Mechanisms to secure an ongoing, efficient allocation of
resources to digital preservation activities
 Appropriate governance of digital preservation activities

9. Digital Preservation
 Scenarios: Scholarly Discourse
 Recommendation 1
 Libraries, scholars and professional societies should develop
selection criteria for emerging digital genres in scholarly
discourse, and prototype preservation and access strategies to
support them
 Recommendation 2
 Publishers reserving the right to preserve should party with third-
party archives or libraries to ensure long-term digital preservation

10. Digital Preservation
 Recommendation 3
 Scholars should consider granting non-exclusive rights to publish
and preserve, to enable decentralized and distributed
preservation of emerging scholarly discourse
 Recommendation 4
 Libraries should create a mechanism to organise and clarify their
governance issues and responsibilities to preserve monographs
and emerging scholarly discourse along lines similar to those for
e-journals

11. Digital Preservation
 Recommendation 5
 All open-access strategies that assume the persistence of
information over time must consider provisions for the funding of
preservation

12. Digital Preservation
 Scenarios: Research Data
 Recommendation 1
 Each domain, through professional societies or other
consensus-making bodies, should set priorities for data
selection, level of curation and length of retention
 Recommendation 2
 Funders should impose preservation mandates, when
appropriate. When mandates are imposed, funders should
also specify selection criteria, funds to be used, and
responsible organizations to provide archiving

13. Digital Preservation
 Scenarios: Research Data
 Recommendation 3
 Funding agencies should explicitly recognize ‘data under
stewardship’ as a core indicator of scientific effort and
include this information in the standard reporting
mechanisms
 Recommendation 4
 Preservation services should reduce preservation and
archiving costs by leveraging economies of scale where
possible

14. Digital Preservation
 Scenarios: Research Data
 Recommendation 5
 Agreements with third-party archives should stipulate
processes, outcomes, retention periods, and handoff triggers

15. Contents
1. The European Information Landscape
2. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
3. LIBER and APARSEN
4. LIFE project on digital preservation costing
5. Next Steps
 European Infrastructures
6. Conclusions

16. APARSEN
 30 partners, led by the Science and Technology Facilities Council
 Envisaged Outcomes
 Integration of the majority of the research activities in digital preservation
within a common vision, terminology and evidence standard
 Common agreement of the services needed for preservation, access and
most importantly re-use of data holdings over the whole lifecycle
 Embedding of legal and economic issues, including costs, governance
issues and digital rights in digital preservation
 Discipline of data curators with appropriate qualifications recognised
across Europe, and well defined support services

17. LIBER and APARSEN
 LIBER will look at the level of preparation in Europe to adopt the Blue
Ribbon Task Force’s recommendations
 Work package led by Austrian National Library / University of Patras
 LIBER will survey key stakeholders with an interest in digital
preservation 4 stakeholder categories
 Research Data
 Scholarly Discourse
 Collectively-created Content
 Commercially-owned Cultural Content
 The National and International agencies category of stakeholders
identified by the Blue Ribbon report will also be contacted
 Result will be a comprehensive Report on the situation in Europe

18. Contents
1. The European Information Landscape
2. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
3. LIBER and APARSEN
4. LIFE project on digital preservation costing
5. Next Steps
 European Infrastructures
6. Conclusions

19. LIFE
 Collaboration between British Library and UCL
 Developed a generic lifecycle costing formula (v2)
See http://www.life.ac.uk/

20. LIFE Model v2

21. Case Study 1: Burney Newspapers
 Curation costs for the British Library’s Burney
newspapers
 Burney Digital Collection and Legal Deposit Newspaper
Collection were used to obtain digital and analogue costs

22. Case Study 1: Burney Newspapers
 Headline conclusion
 Same lifecycle model can be used to cost analogue AND digital
preservation
 Too simplistic to say that digital preservation is cheaper
that analogue preservation
 More Studies needed

23. Case Study 2:
SHERPA-LEAP Open Access repositories
 SHERPA-LEAP is a consortium of Open Access
repositories in London
Year 1 Repository Lifecycle costs per entity

24. Case Study 2:
SHERPA-LEAP Open Access repositories
 Variations in costings can be attributed to a number of
factors
 Staff on different staffing grades
 Goldsmiths manages a large number of complex digital materials
and this raises the handling costs per object
 After Year 1, main costs are associated with Preservation

25. Case Study 3: SHERPA-DP
 Distributed Repository Environment For Digital
Preservation of Content
 See http://www.sherpadp.org.uk/
 Headline conclusion
 Costs of Digital Preservation do not vary significantly according to
quantities
 as automated processes have been established
 Largest cost area was in Bit Stream preservation
 Included staff elements for system administration and technology
monitoring, as well as for storage provision

26. Case Study 3: SHERPA-DP
Summary of total costs from SHERPA-DP Case Study

27. Headline Repository Findings
 SHERPA-DP Case Study shows that cost-effective 3rd
party digital preservation solution is possible for the UK
 Costing figures are not yet robust enough to allow generic
conclusions to be reached
 Most libraries/repositories find it a challenge to undertake
lifecycle costings
 Digital Preservation is not yet embedded in the Higher
Education community

28. Contents
1. The European Information Landscape
2. Blue Ribbon Task Force on Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
3. LIBER and APARSEN
4. LIFE project on digital preservation costing
5. Next Steps
 European Infrastructures
6. Conclusions

29. EU Infrastructures
 EU Consultation on Access to, and Preservation of, Scientific
Information took place in Luxembourg on 31 May 2011
 LIBER’s Statement is available at http://www.libereurope.eu/news/llber-
statement-at-the-public-hearing-on-access-to-and-preservation-of-
scientific-information-l
 Statement covers:
 Open Access
 Copyright reform
 Digital Preservation
 Fair dealing exemptions should also cover format shifting to allow
libraries and memory institutions to preserve digitally for the long
term the digital content that European researchers use and need
 EU will be consulting further with a view to issuing an EU Directive

30. EU Infrastructures
 European research needs sustainable infrastructures for long-term
access to digital materials
 Key Questions to be addressed
 Roles and Responsibilities
 Does everyone need to undertake digital preservation, or can it be left to
a chosen few?
 What infrastructure is needed to deliver long-term access?
 Who will pay?
 How much will it cost?
 How does copyright legislation at the EU and Member State level need to
change?

31. EU Infrastructures
 LIBER wishes to undertake a Study to
 Identify what provision currently exists for the digital preservation
of commercial e-journals, e-books and European cultural content
 Propose a solution for the creation of a sustainable digital
preservation service to solve these issues for European
researchers, including the high-level technical requirements of
such a service
 Evaluate possible technical solutions, based either on a single
platform/service provider or on a series of networked, inter-linked
platforms around Europe

32. EU Infrastructures
 Define the licence models and legal framework in which such a
service would operate
 Identify whether such a service would best be run by one or more
European institutions or be put out to contract to a commercial
supplier
 Identify the costs of developing such a solution for European
researchers and the economic sustainability of such a service
 Identify the roles and responsibilities of all relevant stakeholders
for the provision of the service, including governance structures

33. E-Depot UK curation German curation Other curation
Netherlands Node(s) Node(s) Node(s)
Registry 1 Registry 2 Registry 3 Registry etc.
Consolidated Registry from
Partners
Users
Ideal European architecture for Digital Preservation infrastructure

34. Conclusions
 European Information landscape needs to be underpinned by long-
term access to its resources
 Blue Ribbon Task Force has defined what needs to be in place for
economically-sustainable digital preservation to exist and has made
recommendations
 To be tested in Europe by LIBER in APARSEN
 Projects such as LIBER’s LIFE project have identified tools and costs
for digital preservation
 Infrastructure to deliver sustainable digital pan-European
preservation services is now required

35. If you have been…
 Thanks for listening
 Happy to discuss further