Article: Perseids: Experimenting with Infrastructure for Creating and Sharing Research Data in the Digital Humanities

There is a large variety of repositories that are responsible for providing long term access to data that is used for research. As data volumes and the demands for more open access to this data increase, these repositories are coming under increasing financial pressures that can undermine their long-term sustainability. This report explores the income streams, costs, value propositions, and business models for 48 research data repositories. It includes a set of recommendations designed to provide a framework for developing sustainable business models and to assist policy makers and funders in supporting repositories with a balance of policy regulation and incentives.

Executive Summary Too often we tend to hear one single narrative about the state of newspapers in the United States. The newspaper industry is not one sector. While there are considerable variances between the myriad of outlets—whether national titles, major metros, dailies in large towns, alt weeklies, publications in rural communities, ethnic press, and so […]

The strategy to rescue the Guardian from financial oblivion has attained a landmark position by increasing its revenue from readers to a point where it now outweighs the paper’s income from advertising.

And how to change their minds.

Warning that new regulations will give Google, Apple and Facebook too much control of advertising and personal data

Wealthy individuals, grant-making foundations and others turn to a model reminiscent of the Renaissance that focuses on a creator’s full career, not just a piece or a collection.

Article: Organizational Resilience in Data Archives: Three Case Studies in Social Science Data Archives

In Part 2  of this series I criticized Kalev Leetaru's Are Web Archives Failing The Modern Web: Video, Social Media, Dynamic Pages and The M...

Nice piece on journal-publishing software and workflows. Includes data publishing.

You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” “You can’t get something for nothing.” “Somebody has to pay.” People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion. But history has

The most frequent question that is asked in scholarly communication circles about gold open access is whether a business model is sustainable and/or scalable.

Presentation at the Archives and Records Association (ARA) 2016 Annual Conference in London.The presentation builds on ‘parsimonious preservation’ from Tim Gollins at the National Archive.  Being parsimonious means to ‘get on and do’ preservation in a simple and cost effective way.  The approach is to target the immediate and real issues that digital content actually creates, rather than what the digital preservation community thinks might be problems in the future.   Archives holdings are diversifying, digital content inexorably grows, but budgets remain limited.   There is never more a pressing time to apply the parsimonious approach.   This paper will present practical tools and techniques (e.g. DROID, Exactly, Archivematica) for parsimonious preservation, particularly in the areas of capturing metadata (know what you have), and safe storage (keep the bits safe).  Just as importantly, the paper will review evidence that some of the perceived risks to digital content (e.g. file format obsolescence) and some of the candidate techniques for long-term storage (e.g. preservation grade digital media) are not cost effective when budgets are limited.  Critical thinking is a skill that all archivists should develop when debunking some of the long-held beliefs of the preservation community.    There are two main messages of the talk.  Firstly, digital preservation is a growing and pressing problem for archives and there is a need for action right now.  Secondly, digital preservation is an opportunity, not a burden, for achieving a future for digital assets.   The good news is that recent evolutions in technology and best practice mean that action is now easier to take than ever - but only if an eye is firmly placed on keeping it simple.  The complexities, theory and rapidly evolving technical landscape of digital preservation can also be a barrier, especially if the ‘best becomes the enemy of the good’.  The danger is getting caught up in digital preservation as an aspiration, or, worse still, not doing digital preservation at all because of the fear of not doing it ‘properly’ – a form of ‘preservation paralysis’.  This talk shows an alternative where preservation can done using basic tools, commodity IT infrastructure, or hosted services, and can actually deliver significant and real benefits, including making digital material more accessible and usable.