Voyage to the new world

Dr. Adam Farquhar

Head of Digital Library Technology

Head of Digital Scholarship (from April 2011)

The British Library

Chair, Open Planets Foundation

President, DataCite

NFAIS 2011, Philadelphia 1-Mar-2011

The British Library: some facts and figures

Helping people

advance knowledge to

enrich lives

GIA Funding 08/09:

£94.8m operational,

£12m capital

Other funding secured 07/08:

c.£33m

National library of the UK.

Serves researchers, business,

libraries, education & the general

public

Collection includes over 2m

sound recordings, 5m reports, theses

and conference papers, the world’s

largest patents collection (c.50m)

3 main sites in London and

Yorkshire. Circa 2,000 staff

Business and IP Centre:

Providing inspiration, and enabling

protection of creative capital and

business development

Generates value to the UK

economy each year of 4.4 times

public funding

Collection fills over 600km of

shelving and grows at 11km per year

70 Tb of digital material through

voluntary deposit

British Library Act 1972

National centre for reference, study, bibliographical and other information services, in relation both to scientific and

technological matters, and to the humanities.

Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014, H.M. Treasury (2004)

UK research base must have ready and efficient access to information of all kinds – such as experimental data sets,

journals, theses, conference proceedings and patents. This is the life blood of research and innovation.

The largest document supply

service in the world. Secure

e-delivery and ‘just in time’

digitisation enables desktop

delivery within 2 hours

The Expanding Digital Universe

Content holding

organisations project a

twenty-five-fold rise, from a

median of less than 20TB

now to over 500TB in 2019

IDC projects

Doubling every 18

months

700 exabytes in 2010

source:

“Are You Ready? Assessing European Organisations’

Preparations forDigital Preservation”

Planets Deliverable D7b, November 2009

source:

“The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe”

IDC White Paper, March 2008

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-

exploding-digital-universe.pdf

Information storage – 196 BC

Carrier

Solid material (granodiorite)

114cm x 72cm x 28cm

760 kg

Encoding

Human-readable characters

Three language scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic, ancient Greek)

Access

Human, capable of reading (at least) one of the scripts

Information storage – 2010 AD

Carrier

Hardware

Storage medium (hard disk, optical disc, …)

Rendering environment (display, printer, …)

Software

Operating system

Applications (browser, editor, …)

Encoding

Machine-readable: Binary data

Human-readable: Characters

Access

Human, capable of reading

We need software

We need rendering facilities

We need knowledge of how to operate the hardware and software

6

Losing just one bit can be catastrophic

source: Manfred Thaller, UzK

7

Content Preservation: Understand a digital file

SOI

APP0 JFIF

1.2

APP13 IPTC

APP2 ICC

DQT

SOF0 183x512

DRI

DHT

SOS

ECS0

RST0

ECS1

RST1

ECS2…

ffd8ffe000104a46494600010201

008300830000ffed0fb050686f74

6f73686f7020332e30003842494d

03e90a5072696e7420496e666f00

0000007800000000004800480000

000002f40240ffeeffee03060252

0347052803fc0002000000480048

0000000002d80228000100000064

000000010003030300000001270f

0001000100000000000000000000

0000600800190190000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000003842

494d03ed0a5265736f6c7574696f

6e0000000010008313a3000200…

source: Stephen Abram, California Digital Library

Working together to preserve content in the UK

StP

BSp

NLW

NLS

Ox

Ca

TCD

JANET

Access Gateway

Storage Node

BL Digital Library System

Resilient

No single point of failure

Geographically distributed

Multi-site

Multi-organisation

Recoverable

Background integrity

checking

Self-healing from alternate

sites

Authentic

Time-stamped digital

signatures

Tamper-resistant/evident

hardware

Scalable

Underlying design principle

Scale horizontally /

vertically

Use commodity storage

9

Working together to preserve content

The Open Planets

Foundation helps members

meet their digital preservation

challenges

OPF Stewardship:

Assure development & maintenance of a comprehensive DP suite

Leverage R&D results

Help to mature prototypes & demonstrators

Support Open Source initiatives

Partner with university sector to develop DP curriculum

Promote commercial partnerships to grow the DP marketplace

Charter

Members

Affiliate

Members

Part

ner

Init

iati

ves

Te

ch

no

log

y &

Se

rvic

e P

rovid

ers

OPF

SCAlable Preservation Environments

SCAPE addresses critical challenges that have been identified by the Commission and key stakeholders

SCAPE results will enable organisations to

Keep pace with the rapid growth of digital collection

Use a highly scalable architecture and reduce human intervention

Ensure that their preservation actions have been effective

Fulfill their increasing regulatory obligations

Reduce the risks to their digital material

SCAPE will

Transform the manner in which we safeguard digital content

Increase confidence in the long-term accessibility and integrity of collections

At the European, national, and organisational levels

Change how we design and build digital repositories

SCAPE started 1-Feb-2011

11

12

Good science relies on good data

13

Currently…

No effective way to link

between articles and

datasets

No widely used method to

identify datasets

No widely used method to

cite datasets

Articles

Underlying

data

14

As a result…

Datasets are:

Difficult to discover

Difficult to access

In danger of being lost

Sharing data on request is not effective

Wicherts et al (2006) requested data from 141 articles in

psychology

“6 months later, after … 400 emails, [sending] detailed

descriptions of our study aims, approvals of our ethical

committee, signed assurances not to share data with

others, and even our full resumes…” only 27% of authors

complied

Campbell et al. (2002) surveyed geneticists

Most frequent reason for withholding data was the effort

required to share it (80%).

28% were unable confirm published findings because of

data withholding

Modified from: Todd Vision, U North Carolina

16

DataCite

Support researchers by enabling them to locate, identify, and cite research datasets with confidence

Support data centres by providing persistent identifiers for datasets, workflows and standards for data publication

Support publishers by enabling research articles to be linked to the underlying data

DataCite : Data Centres :: CrossRef : Publishers

17

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) offer a solution

A DOI is a unique identifier, similar in concept to an ISBN.

Mostly widely used identifier for scientific articles

Researchers, authors, publishers know how to use them

Put datasets on the same playing field as articles

DataCite

Dataset

Yancheva et al (2007). Analyses

on sediment of Lake Maar.

PANGAEA.

doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.587840

URLs are not persistent

(e.g. Wren JD: URL decay in MEDLINE- a 4-year

follow-up study. Bioinformatics. 2008, Jun

1;24(11):1381-5).

Thanks for your attention!

Infrastructure for digital

content

Save the bits

Save the content

Work together through

OPF

Infrastructure for

scholarly communication

Citation is key

DataCite

More information

www.bl.uk/dp

www.bl.uk/datasets

www.openplanetsfounda

tion.org

www.datacite.org

18Adam {.} Farquhar {@} BL.UK