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Blue Ribbon Task Force on
Economically-Sustainable
Digital Preservation
Dr Paul Ayris
Director of UCL Library Services and UCL Copyright Officer
e-mail: p.ayris@ucl.ac.uk
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Contents
 Background to the Task Force
 Task Force Report and Recommendations
 Next Steps
 Thanks to Brian Lavoie (OCLC) for sharing slides from his
forthcoming presentation at the Annual LIBER Conference in
Aarhus, Denmark
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Contents
 Background to the Task Force
 Task Force Report and Recommendations
 Next Steps
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2007: Amount of digital
information created, captured,
or replicated exceeded
available storage capacity
Issue
“Dealing with the digital
universe is not a technical
problem alone”
Perpetuating digital signals
Deciding what is preserved
Accommodating IPR
Matching means to ends
Source: “The Diverse and Exploding Digital
Universe” IDC Whitepaper, March 2008
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Task Force
 Task Force:
Supported by NSF, Mellon, Library of Congress, JISC,
CLIR, NARA
Co-chairs: Brian Lavoie (OCLC), Fran Berman (RPI)
Cross-domain, cross-discipline
http://brtf.sdsc.edu/
 2 UK members, nominated by JISC
 Paul Ayris
 Chris Rusbridge
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Timetable
 Interim Report
 Issued in December
2008
 Setting a baseline
 Final Report
 Issued in February 2010
 Coming up with
Recommendations
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Launch of Report
A National Conversation on the
Economic Sustainability of Digital Information
Washington, DC
April 1, 2010
Sustainable Economics for a
Digital Planet
London, UK
May 6, 2010
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Final Report
Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet
http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf
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Key Message which underlines Report
 What is key to proposing solutions?

“… sustainable economics for digital
preservation is not just about finding more
funds. It is about building an economic
activity firmly rooted in a compelling value
proposition, clear incentives to act, and welldefined preservation roles and
responsibilities.”
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Contents
 Background to the Task Force
 Task Force Report and Recommendations
 Next Steps
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Case Studies in 4 Digital Preservation
contexts
 Scholarly Discourse
 Research Data
 Commercially-Owned Cultural Content
 Collectively-produced web content
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Headline principles
 Articulate a compelling value proposition
 Provide clear incentives to preserve in the public interest
 Define roles and responsibilities among stakeholders
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Scholarly Discourse
This is a fairly mature field, with well-developed preservation
and funding strategies as a legacy of the print world. Disruptions
are occurring to longstanding sustainability strategies as a result
of digital preservation and distribution. There are particular
needs to align preservation incentives among commercial and
non-profit providers; ensure handoffs between commercial
publishers and stewardship organizations in the interest of longterm preservation of the scholarly record; and address the freerider problem. Clarification of the long-term value of emerging
genres of digital scholarship, such as academic blogs and grey
literature, is a high priority. Research and education institutions,
professional societies, publishers, libraries, and scholars all
have leading roles to play in creating sustainable preservation
strategies for the materials that are valuable to them.
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Recommendations 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 non-exclusive 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.
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Research Data
There is a remarkable growth of data-intensive research in all
knowledge domains. In most fields, there is high recognition of
the benefits of preserving research data for various purposes
and lengths of time. But there are few robust systems for
making decisions about what to preserve; and there is often a
lack of coordination of roles, responsibilities, and funding
sources among those best positioned to preserve data
(researchers) and the preservation infrastructure (curation and
archiving services) that should support them. Research and
education institutions, professional societies, archives,
researchers, and the funding agencies that support data
creation all have leading roles to play in creating sustainable
preservation strategies.
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Recommendations 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
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Challenge to Society
 Sustainable preservation is a societal concern and transcends the
boundaries of any particular content domain.
 All parts of society—national and international agencies, funders and
sponsors of data creation, stakeholder organizations, and individuals—
have roles in achieving sustainability.
 Leadership is needed at all levels of society.
 Report presents a summary of the action agendas for these major
stakeholders.
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Actions required
 Organisational Action
 developing public-private partnerships
 ensuring that organizations have access to skilled personnel, from
domain experts to legal and business specialists
 creating and sustaining secure chains of stewardship between
organizations over time
 achieving economies of scale and scope
 addressing the free-rider problem
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Actions required
 Technical Action
 building capacity to support stewardship in all areas
 lowering the cost of preservation overall
 determining the optimal level of technical curation needed to
operationalize an option strategy for all types of digital material
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Actions required
 Public Policy
 modifying copyright laws to enable digital preservation
 creating incentives and requirements for private entities to preserve
on behalf of the public (e.g. financial incentives)
 sponsoring public-private partnerships
 clarifying rights issues associated with Web-based materials
 empowering stewardship organizations to protect digital orphans
from unacceptable loss
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Actions required
 Education and Public Outreach
 promoting education and training for 21st century digital
preservation (domain-specific skills, curatorial best practices, core
competencies in relevant science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics knowledge)
 raising awareness of the urgency to take timely preservation
actions
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Contents
 Background to the Task Force
 Task Force Report and Recommendations
 Next Steps
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Next Steps
 The BRTF-SDPA proposed a Grand Challenge
recommendation for the U.S. Office of Science and
Technology Policy’s submission website to ensure
that the knowledge of today is available for use
tomorrow. Read the BRTF-SDPA Grand Challenge
submission report Strategy for American Innovation.
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Government roles
 Stimulate R&D and the Development of Necessary Technical
Infrastructure
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Increased bandwidth for efficient, timely backup and delivery
Secure storage that survives long periods of “benign neglect”
Distributed networks of data storage and curation centers
WEB 3.0 and beyond tools to support data creation, curation, and
preservation
 Foster innovative uses of social networking tools for education and
libraries
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Government roles
 Stimulate the Development of Human Infrastructure
 Invest in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and
Maths) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths)
Education to prepare tomorrow’s workers
 Create new fellowship programs for cross-disciplinary initiatives in
library, archival, museum, and information sciences and related
disciplines
 Extend engineering fellowships to engineers working in digital archives
and the arts
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Government roles
 Develop Policy Infrastructure
 Foster adoption of open, well-documented, “archives-ready” formats
 Provide incentives or mandates as appropriate for researchers to
publish and archive data
 Develop policies and procedures for data management and
stewardship mandates for publicly funded knowledge creation
 Develop policies and procedures such as mandates for data curation
and stewardship in all federally funded research-based activities, from
scientific exploration to industrial development of technologies. Match
these mandates to development of repositories that can scale to meet
data deposit requirements
 Develop financial incentives for private enterprise to archive valued
information in the public good
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And finally…
 If you have been…
 Thanks for listening
 We hope Task Force
Report is a roadmap
for future action