SPRUCE Hackathon – File Characterisation

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The other week I had the opportunity to participate in the SPRUCE Hackathon hosted by Leeds University.  Hackathons are an opportunity for developers to get together and work on (or hack) common problems.  Typically hackathons in the USA are fuelled by Mountain Dew and pizza, but as this was a British hackathon it was mostly fuelled by tea and cakes (and mighty fine cakes thanks to Becky).  The hackathon was specifically focused on issues around file characterisation, which is precisely identifying and describing the technical characteristics of a file as well as its metadata.  This is an ongoing challenge for practitioners in the digital preservation realm since there are many file formats, many versions of those many file formats, and little consistency in the way these many file formats and their many versions internally identify themselves.  Digital archivists need to know more than just the file extension or format’s name, which Gary McGath sums up nicely in his recent Code4Lib article:

Just knowing the format’s generic name isn’t enough. If you have a “Microsoft Word” file, that doesn’t tell you whether it’s a version from the early eighties, a recent document in Microsoft’s proprietary format, or an Office Open XML document. The three have practically nothing in common but the name.

Thankfully there are a number of characterisation tools to help digital archivists with this, and of the attendees at the hackathon were some of the key developers behind the major tools such as JHOVE, JHOVE2, FITS, DROID and C3PO.  This provided an exciting opportunity to work alongside them on their tools and learn more about how the tools work.
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ADS wins DPC Decennial Award

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As part of its tenth anniversary celebrations, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) awarded its Decennial Award, for an outstanding contribution to digital preservation, to the Archaeology Data Service.

We beat off intense competition from Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, to take the award at a ceremony at the Wellcome Collection in London on December the 3rd.

The Decennial Prize – the DPC’s most prestigious – is awarded specially to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the DPC. It recognises the most outstanding work over the decade that the DPC has existed. After a painstaking assessment, an expert panel selected finalists from New York, Washington and London as well as York.

The ADS recieve the DPC Decennial Award

The ADS recieve the DPC Decennial Award

Our Director, Professor Julian Richards who accepted the award from Dame Lynne Brindley, said: “Winning this award is an outstanding achievement for the ADS and it is extremely gratifying to have the last decade’s effort and hard work recognised by our peers. The ADS was up against some stiff competition to win this first decennial award, so we are particularly thrilled to have received this tremendous accolade.”

William Kilbride, Executive Director of the DPC said: “These awards are important in showcasing the creative solutions that have been developed towards digital preservation. Digital preservation is critical. We know that significant parts of the economy, industry, research, government and the public life depend on the opportunities information technology creates, but the rapid churn in technology means data is also surprisingly fragile. We are the first generation that’s had to think about handing on a digital legacy, so we need to act quickly to develop the skills and techniques that will ensure our legacy is protected.”

In July, ADS also received the British Archaeological Award for Best Archaeological Innovation of 2012 in recognition of technical innovations it developed which allowed thousands of hitherto unpublished fieldwork reports to be made freely available online to any user.

Impact Project Update

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The Impact of the Archaeology Data Service: a study and methods for enhancing sustainability

We are now just over half-way through the project that commenced in February 2012 and will conclude in July 2013. We have successfully completed desk research and two surveys of ADS Users and Depositors respectively.

In November we held our community focus group and presentation of interim results at a workshop in York. The aims of the workshop were to seek stakeholder feedback on the emerging results, establish any change of perception of the ADS amongst participants as a result of the study, and seek their views on how the study results might be presented to the archaeological community and its funders.

Invitations were sent to a range of sector representatives and eleven delegates attended the workshop, of which four were from the Local Authority sector, three from National Authorities, one from Universities, one from the Commercial sector, one shared university/commercial sectors, and one from Publishing. It was an extremely valuable day and the feedback will help shape our final phase of dissemination of the study results and contribute to our final report.

We have recently made our project workshop presentation of interim/provisional findings from the study and our post-dissemination activity value perception report (a report of workshop participant feedback) available on the project webpage.

We are now working on the final weighting of the economic analysis with the aim of incorporating the latest results in presentations, posters and leaflets that can be presented and distributed at forthcoming events during 2013 including the International Digital Curation Conference, The World Archaeological Congress, and Computer Applications in Archaeology.

ReACTing to digital archive requirements.

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Logo Montage

In April this year our former colleague, Jen Mitcham, attended the inaugural SPRUCE digital preservation mash-up in Glasgow (16th-18 April 2012), an event organised by Leeds University Library as part of the JISC funded Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement Project (SPRUCE) which intends to foster wider communication within the digital archiving sector. During discussions at the event it was identified that one of the practical problems effecting the management of digital files within archives was the ability to compare and monitor the migration of files during various stages of the archive process (Millard 2012). At the outset it was identified that any solution to this problem needed to easy for to use and could be deployed directly from the desktop in order to a wider appeal to users of varying computing ability. During the event Andrew Amato (London School of Economics and Political Science) developed a series of tools, based around Microsoft Excel and VBA macros, which assisted in the audit of collections (Amato 2012). Having developed a proof of concept it was found that the uniqueness of repository infrastructures made the application of the tools problematic outside the specific organisations for which it was initially developed, as a result it was considered that a more generic version of the tool would have a broader appeal and potential use value within the wider digital preservation community. With this in mind a successful application was made to the SPRUCE award scheme allowing Andrew Amato and Ray Moore time to develop what was christened ReACT (Resource Audit and Comparison Tool) further, with a period of testing of the resultant tool on archives from ADS’ collections.

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DPC Decadal Award Nomination: ADS short listed amongst esteemed company.

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The announcement of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) awards shortlist is always greeted with some excitement the digital community, but this year’s list was particularly well received here as the ADS due to our short listing in the ‘outstanding contribution to digital preservation in the last decade’ category. To be listed in such esteemed company as the International Internet Preservation Consortium, The PREMIS Metadata Working Group and The National Archives is an honour which reflects the hard work being carried out here at the ADS over the last 15 years. At the same time the nomination of subject specific data centre, the only one listed in the 2012 list, should be considered a tribute to the forward thinking attitude in archaeology and heritage management generally which places the discipline at the forefront on digital technology.

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JISC-British Library data citation workshop

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A summary of the July 6th JISC-British Library workshop on “metadata for effective data citation”  by Caroline Wilkinson  of the British Libraray is now up on the DataCite blog , this includes a summary of the presentation by the ADS’s own Michael Charno and a link to his slides. There is also a Mendeley reading list with links to articles and resources that are relevant to the workshop themes and to research data citation issues in general. All workshop presentations are available in full on the BL website.

PDF, or PDF/A: that is the question

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The Portable Document Format (PDF) remains the most popular and de facto format for the sharing of printable documents across the web. As such the PDF has become deeply embedded within personal, institutional and governmental workflows since its inception in 1993; indeed its pervasiveness is highlighted by the 100,000 or so PDFs within the ADS’ collections, making it by far our most common file type. As a result we thought it might be useful to provide some insight into the PDF, and its archival equivalent PDF/A, so that you can benefit from our (very!) long discussions and sleepless nights.
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Migrating Data: The Council for British Archaeology Research Reports

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At the Archaeology Data Service we know that in order to keep files safe and accessible long into the future, we need to migrate or refresh them. This will create newer versions of the files to replace the old files which would one day be unreadable by modern software. To this end, we are currently working on one of the very first large collections that was entrusted to us back in the early days of the ADS. This collection is an archive of Council for British Archaeology (CBA) Research Reports. This run of reports dating back to 1955 were no longer in print so were scanned and given to us in digital form (as tif images and pdf files) to archive and make more widely available on-line. The collection in our care consists of over 100 reports which cover many different topics and themes within British Archaeology. This has remained one of our most popular and frequently accessed resources since we began making it available on-line in the year 2000.
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New Study on the Impact of the ADS

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UPDATE: PLEASE NOTE THESE SURVEYS ARE NOW CLOSED

USERS https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ADS-Users  [Closed]
DEPOSITORS https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ADS_Depositors [Closed]

For more than fifteen years the ADS has been working to serve its users, both by acting as a long-term repository for valuable archaeological data and by providing open and free access to this data for research purposes. Our users, both those who deposit data and those who access it, come from all possible sectors of the archaeology discipline. We regularly deal with data and data requests from academic archaeologists, local and national government archaeologists, the commercial sector, the community archaeology sector and, being an open archive, the general public. The ADS’s significance in the archaeological landscape has grown considerably in the last decade or so and with the use of access statistics and user feedback it has generally been easy for the ADS to demonstrate that we offer a valuable service to our users.  However, it is a much more challenging proposition to find ways of analysing ADS usage that make a clear statement about the very important issue of how much economic impact that the ADS has on the sector.   An ADS Impact Study funded by JISC is intending to investigate in detail exactly this question and to give a clear indication of what the value of having a free to use and open access resource like the ADS is to the whole archaeological sector.
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