Multi-organizational frameworks for digital information sustainability

Cherie EdmondsCatherine Hrbal

Chisheng Li

Multi-organizational Frameworks for

Sustainability

Main Themes

YorkChallenges in developing a large-scale digitzation effort - looking at HathiTrust

HathiTrust WebsiteCurrent governance and cost of digital preservation efforts

Walter & SkinnerCreates incentive by looking at costs of NOT preserving - MetaArchive Cooperative as community-operated model

Blue Ribbon Task Force Report - Chapters 4 & 5

Challenges behind a digital preservation project, talks about incentives, and gives simple recommendations and pragmatic small steps you can take to get a project running

Important Terms

Barriers to Entry - tangible costs and challenges to start a project

Benign Neglect - choosing not to focus on preservation today

Contributing Partner - contribute content and pay infrastructure costs for deposited content

Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) - includes the Big Ten schools and University of Chicago

Economy of Scale - cost advantage to lower both the average and marginal costs of preservation in a large repository

MetaArchive Cooperative - community-owned and operated distributed digital preservation network

Misaligned Incentives –each participant in a transaction has their own incentives to act. Each party’s incentives are not the same, and sometimes they conflict.

Important Terms cont.

Negative Benefits - looking at the cost of NOT preserving as incentive to do digital preservation

Non-Exclusive License - rights of the authors to deposit publications into third party repositories

Sustaining Partner - participate in curation and management, but do not necessarily contribute content

Trusted Digital Repository - certified by TRAC or DRAMBORA whose criteria are based off metadata and formatting standards and best practices

Uncertain Future Value - intangible long-term benefits and costs, unable to gauge the benefits for future

Zero-Sum Activity - time and money invested into preservation is taken directly from other activities

Blue Ribbon Task Force

There is a disruption of roles and responsibilities among players, resulting from the non-rivalrous nature of digital information

Chapter four outlined four types of digital information and the challenges and proposed recommendations for each

Scholarly Discourse

Misaligned incentives

• Publisherso have high incentives to preserve these

materialso have shown little resistance to participating

in dark archive models

• Authors/ Creatorso should stipulate perpetual, non exclusive

license to their workso collective bargaining to secure these rightso individual use of these licenses could lower

barriers to preservation of emerging literature

• Librarieso mediation

Question:

Do you think collective bargaining would be effective to help lower barriers to entry for emerging authors? Do you think this tactic is feasible?

Free rider problem large startup costs create barriers to entry no one wants the be the first mover

Uncertain future value secondary and tertiary uses of the information

Fundingthe current models exclude a significant portion of the scholarly community:

smaller publishers under-resourced fields independent scholars and the commercial sector

Action Agenda for Scholarly Discourse

1. Libraries, scholars, and professional societies should develop selection criteria for emerging genres in scholarly discourse, and prototype preservation and access strategies to support them.

2. Publishers reserving the right to preserve should partner with third-party archives or libraries to ensure long-term preservation.

3. Scholars should consider granting nonexclusive rights to publish and preserve, to enable decentralized and distributed preservation of emerging scholarly discourse.

4. Libraries should create a mechanism to organize and clarify their governance issues and responsibilities to preserve monographs and emerging scholarly discourse along lines similar to those for e-journals.

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

Research Data

Research data vary enormously

Often a need to preserve ancillary materials, such as lab notebooks

Secondary uses of public research data suggest a new users willing to support long-term access to the data

Preservation societies and other proxy organizations can play crucial roles in selection for preservation

In grant-funded research, preservation is framed as a zero-sum game

Imposition of mandates will strengthen incentives• clear allocation of funds ( via a portion of the grant)• clear selection criteria

Funders should be seeding capacity Subscription models help mitiagte the

free-rider problem There should be agreements in place

between the data community and third-party archives

Action Agenda for Research Data

1. Each domain, through professional societies or other consensus making bodies, should set priorities for data selection, level of curation, and length of retention.

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.

3. Funding agencies should explicitly recognize “data under stewardship” as a core indicator of scientific effort and include this information in standard reporting mechanisms.

4. Preservation services should reduce curation and archiving costs by leveraging economies of scale when possible.

5. Agreements with third-party archives should stipulate processes, outcomes, retention periods, and handoff triggers.

Commercially Owned Cultural Content

Who owns it? Misalignment between owners and controllers of digital content arise in almost every case

Creates widespread disruption of business models that provide the primary incentives for commercial owners to preserve

Must strengthen the rights of preserving institutions by revising copyright law

o mandate deposit of copyrighted electronic content into authorize public institutions to secure their lone-term preservation

o provide incentives directly to private owners of cultural assets to preserve on the public's behalf

o commercial sponsorship of preservation activities and public-private partnerships

o stewardship organizations should begin selecting privately held materials of signigicant cultural value

Question:

Could commercial sponsorship of preservation activities be feasible? What might some of the tradeoffs be?

Action Agenda for Commercially Owned Cultural

Content1. Leading cultural organizations should convene expert

communities to address the selection and preservation needs of commercially owned cultural content and digital orphans.

2. Regulatory authorities should bring current requirements for mandatory copyright deposit into harmony with the demands of digital preservation and access.

3. Regulatory authorities should provide financial and other incentives to preserve privately held cultural content in the public interest.

4. Leading stewardship organizations should model and test mechanisms to ensure flexible long-term public-private partnerships that foster cooperative preservation of privately held materials in the public interest.

Collectively Produced Web Content

No clarity about what specific content should be collected

Institutions that are already crawling the web should provide leadership to others

Collective content may be a composite of linked product with compound rights within them

o Bloggers may use some sort of license to clarify whether they want their material archived

o Provide incentives for the hosting sites to preserveo develop partnerships between hosting sites and

stewardship institutionso grant stewardship institutions the legal authority to

crawl the web for preservation purposes

Create public policies and or partnerships to enable grassroots efforts at preservation

Collective action will be needed to secure these assets

• public funding• public mandates

Action Agenda for Collectively Produced Web Content

1. Leading stewardship organizations should convene stakeholders and experts to address the selection and preservation needs of collectively produced Web content.

2. Creators, contributors, and host sites could lower barriers to third party archiving by using a default license to grant nonexclusive rights for archiving.

3. Regulatory authorities should create incentives, such as preservation subsidies, for host sites to preserve their own content or seek third-party archives as preservation partners.

4. Regulatory authorities should take expeditious action to reform legislation to grant authority to stewardship institutions to preserve at-risk Web content.

5. Leading stewardship organizations should develop partnerships with one or more major content providers to explore the technical, legal, and financial dimensions of long-term preservation.

Blue Ribbon Chapter 5 Which digital content to preserve, for how long, and for what

use? Who should be in charge? How to secure funding and resources? How to determine the return of investment?

Necessary conditions for sustainable digital preservation:1. recognition of the benefits of preservation2. choosing the materials that have long-term value3. incentives to act in the public interest4. appropriate governance to oversee the activities5. ongoing effort to preserve6. timely actions to ensure access

Principle of actions1. Create contingency plan for actions to preserve in advance

prevent risk of losing digital assets, and entrust the materials to a responsible party

set up mechanisms (eg. MOUs) to prompt regular review of preservation priorities

2. Argue for a need to invest in preservation emphasize the gains on possible usage of digital assets,

especially short-term also argue about the cost of not preserving the assets eg.

losing clinical trial data argue for potential benefits that will trickle to multiple

stakeholders3. Strengthen weak incentives, aligned the incentives when facing a

diverse stakeholder community, generate incentives when none exist

Principle of actions4. Prioritize the digital collections based on projected future use

careful selection of which digital assets to save, especially materials of greatest use to present & future stakeholders

the decision to preserve now need not be a permanent or open-ended commitment of resources over time

5. Stakeholders' roles & responsibilities should be transparent & accountable

organizations should have clear policies the specify their roles, responsibilities, and procedures

collective interest must be aggregated, and the effort & the cost must be appropriately apportioned

6. Funding models must fit the community norms digital assets need not always be a public good funding models should be flexible to adjust to disruptions over

time; create an economy of scale whenever possible (especially scientific data & cultural assets)

Near-term priorities Organizational action form public-private partnerships ensure organizations have required expertise achieve economies of scale & scope address the free-rider problem

Technical action build capacity to support stewardship reduce preservation cost operationalize an option strategy for all types of digital material

Public Policy action ease copyright laws to facilitate digital preservation generate incentives for private entities to preserve on behalf of the public sponsor public-private partnership empower stewardship organizations to avert loss of digital orphans

Public Outreach action provide training for curatorial skills educate public the urgency for preservation of digital assets

York and HathiTrust Website

Looks at the development of the HathiTrust

Challenges of a large-scale digital preservation initiative

Establishment and Purpose• Google• Members• Preservation

Goals

Question:

Looking at these areas, what are some of the major challenges you think might come about in developing digital preservation initiative?

The Challenges:GovernanceFinanceRepositoryServices

Challenges in Governance

Types of BAD collaborationo "Goal Drift"o No buy-in from administrative bodies

Tensiono Perception that collaboration will limit independence of

participantso Fear of slow decision-making process

Solution: HathiTrust Governanceo Executive Committeeo Strategic Advisory Boardo Constitutional Conventiono Voluntary Membership

Challenges in Finance

Funding Downfallso Voluntary Membership - Potential dissolution

of the partnershipo Minimal Funding Sourceso No long-term plan beyond 5 years

Solution:o Formal evaluation at the 3-year marko Will develop a succession and multi-year

funding plano Different Levels of partnership

Challenges with the Repository

Trusted Environmento Trusted Digital Repository Certification did not

existo Time and Cost of certification

Collaborative Developmento Discovering redundancyo What version is the right version?

Solution:o Certification, Standards, and Best Practiceo Implication of having a unified digital

repository

Challenges with ServicesBasic Access

o Print-disabled userso Compliance with accessibility standards

Searcho No interface for searchingo No comparable models for searching across

institutions of this magnitude

Extended Capabilitieso Integration with with software/primary source

collectionso Print on-demando Inter-institutional authentication and security

Critical Observations

GovernanceDuties of new governing bodies not explained in much detail

FinanceFailed to look at funding sources outside the partnership

RepositoryCost of long-term preservation sustainability

Walter – Cost of Not PreservingCost of digital preservation = 'benign neglect'; cultural either choose to preserve today, or defer the preservation to tomorrow benign neglect misses the fact that digital assets are vulnerable & storage

media are unstable

1. Cultural cost: intangible cost of narrow understanding of our cultures & histories by current

& future generations

2. Political cost: loss of resources & documentations essential for understanding local, state,

national, & international developments

3. Scientific cost: loss of data for all areas of research needed for academic advancement

Libraries that begin early towards digitization and content creation efforts will benefit from better acquisitions, more users, higher quality of users & financial resources increase their prestige & bottom line

The MetaArchive Cooperative Model

Founded in 2003 as a community-owned & operated digital preservation network

Cooperative model: all members contribute monetarily, staff, technology & space reduces cost for all cooperating parties & increases sense of joint ownership

expanding membership fees and cooperative-oriented staffing replace initial public funding from the Library of Congress

Adopt LOCKSS software: all members host servers within their institution, but are connected in a peer-to-peer network avoid a central cache

MetaArchive Members >50 institutions in 13 states & 4 countries

MetaArchive Cost1. Establish the 1st private LOCKSS network (with NDIIPP funding)2. Transform into a sustainable 501c3 charitable organization (with NHPRC &

NDIIPP funding)3. Provide ongoing preservation training & services to the cultural community

(with membership & consulting fees)

Cost components are mainly expert personnel4. Collaborative relationship-building5. planning & policy making6. staff training7. selecting & implementing network systems8. developing & maintaining software9. selecting digital assets for preservations10.documenting the digital assets11.preparing the assets for the preservation network12.assessing and monitoring the assets in the network13. infrastructure

Current cost

Basic costs: Equipment = $4600 for a server Staffing = 2% of a systems administrator’s time, software engineer Storage = $1/GB/year for network storage

Membership fees Sustaining members = $5500/year, typically lead institutions in the

field Preservation members = $3000/year, mainly participants &

beneficiaries

Sample costs:For an institution that want to preserve 2 TB of : Sustaining Member: [$5,500 (membership) +$2,000 (space) x 3

years] + $4,600 (server) = $27,100/3 years, or $9,033/year Preservation Member: [$3,000 (membership) + $2,000 (space)

x3 years] + $4,600 (server) = $19,600/3 years, or $6,533/year