The University Library has a leading role in establishing standards, procedures and services to help researchers preserve their original data. We were therefore delighted to meet Robin Rice, who visited this month.

In a meeting with our Discipline Librarians in February, Robin shared some of her expertise in data sharing, data libraries and roles for librarians in providing data management services for researchers.

As the Data Librarian at the University of Edinburgh, Robin is the service manager for that university’s Data Library, a collection of information produced by Edinburgh scholars in the course of their research activities. Robin is also project manager of DISC-UK DataShare, a JISC-funded project to establish institutional data repositories at three UK universities.

Conducting university research often involves creating new data, processing it, analysing it and perhaps transforming it through visualisation or other methods. Modern technologies allow us to create enormous quantities of data and analysis . Once the research is completed and an article or other ‘finished’ output has been published, the original data needs to be preserved and possibly made available to other researchers in the future. Some data can be destroyed after just a few years; other information will be preserved indefinitely, just like other historical documents.

Whilst in Melbourne, Robin Rice spent most of her time at Monash University. Her presentation to the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) group is available as an MP3 (streaming or download) and presentation slides (PDF 1 Mb).

Valued at A$20,000, the Fellowship is open to scholars and writers to facilitate research and the production of works of literature that utilise the superb collections of the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne.

The Fellowship can be used to assist with travel, living and research expenses.

Guidelines and application forms are available from the Research Office’s web site.

Enquiries: Lynda Gilbert (8344 9333 /  l.gilbert at unimelb.edu.au), Secretary, The Redmond Barry Fellowship Committee, Knowledge Transfer & Partnerships Office.

Applications close on Thursday 30 April 2009.

Here are a few factoids that illustrate how the impact of a cultural institution like the BBC might be measured.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that “The BBC’s digital media services, now grouped together in the future media and technology division, had a budget of £182m during the last financial year, up from £153.7m for 2006-2007.” These figures come from the BBC’s 2007-08 annual report.

This month the Beeb published Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ research “into the economic impact of the BBC’s publicly funded services on the UK broadcasting and creative sector.” The PWC report found that the BBC creates value of “approximately £6.5bn per annum or more than £5bn in the creative sector alone,” is a major provider of training and investment stability for the UK’s creative industries and drives competition and regional development in the creative sector. If the BBC were replaced by a commercial broadcaster, the report says, Britain would lose around £4.4bn of economic impact. (source: BBC Internet blog 22 July 2008)
In 2007 the main BBC web site saw 33 million unique weekly global users including 12 million British adult users per week. More than 16 million BBC podcasts were downloaded in the month of March 2008. (source: BBC Internet blog, 11 July 2008)

The BBC Trust says the Beeb should be a “trusted guide” for Internet users. In a series of blog posts, former BBC.co.uk staffer Martin Belam analyses the Trust’s recommendations about search; on links to external web sites; and on embedded content.

Now the Beeb has appointed Roly Keating as its first Director of Archive Content “with responsibility for maximising public access to the BBC’s invaluable archive of television, radio and multimedia content.” (tip o’ the hat to the BBC Internet blog for this link and quote, and for the quote below)

The BBC TV Archive web site provides more information about digitising and making available this uniquely deep, rich collection of stuff.

In an introductory video Adam Lee remarks:

“We’ve got about 4 million physical items for TV and radio. That’s equivalent to 600,000 hours of TV content and about 350,000 hours of radio. So we’re getting very close now to a million hours of material. We also now have a New Media archive, which is keeping a record of the content that goes out on the BBC’s websites. We also have large sheet-music collections, we have commercial music collections. We have press cuttings going back 40 years as well. So it’s a very large-scale operation.”

How might a university demonstrate its public value? Accepting the maxim that “you value what you count,” what sorts of things should we be keeping count of — the number of books in our libraries, the dollar value of our cultural collections, how many people visit our exhibitions? And what else?

The site explains why Open Access publishing is beneficial to academic researchers, teachers and students, and how to find appropriate avenues for publishing your academic work.

The project was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). These are all USA-based organisations.

Instead of selling their elegant innovation to a pharmaceutical company, they have published their method in an Open Access refereed journal called “Public Library of Science: Neglected Tropical Diseases.” Articles in this journal have a Creative Commons licence that allows free downloading, adaptation and sharing of their content provided the authors receive attribution.

Here is the paper:

• Njiru ZK, Mikosza ASJ, Armstrong T, Enyaru JC, Ndung’u JM, et al. (2008) Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) Method for Rapid Detection of Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense. PLoS Negl. Trop. Dis. 2(2): e147.

See also:

• Simarro PP, Jannin J, Cattand P (2008) Eliminating Human African Trypanosomiasis: Where Do We Stand and What Comes Next. PLoS Med 5(2): e55 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050055

In the Murdoch case, the ‘public good’ factor is a clear winner in the debate over whether to provide open access to a university’s research output: people in poor and developing countries need low-cost medical and health care, particularly for endemic diseases that don’t occur as widely in developed countries (trypanosomiasis is one; malaria is another). Publishing this particular research in a free, Open Access journal helps to remove economic barriers from potential users of the new technique (assuming that the researchers have not patented the technique itself).

Is the public good a sufficient reason for a university to release all of its innovations for general usage?

Should we seek to earn income from the inventions of our staff?

What about the inventions of students? (Sun Microsystems and the Google search engine both started as graduate student projects.)

In an era when universities are using multiple income streams to offset declining government/public funding, how do we decide when to commercialise and when to donate our intellectual products?

Note: This post was originally published on 6 March, then revised on 11 March. Thanks to Stephen Young for his off-line comments about the original version. As I understand it, Stephen was keen to draw a distinction between the copyright on the research paper and the ownership of intellectual property in the laboratory technique described in that paper. The copyright is covered by the Creative Commons licence; regardless of copyright in the paper, it may still be possible to patent the intellectual property.

When you participate in such online communities, you give up some of your right to privacy and some aspects of control over the intellectual property you create in that environment. In return, the service provider makes money by selling advertising or other spin-off goods and services that are targeted to fit (their idea of) your particular interests and desires. Somebody’s making money from this deal, and it probably is not you.

So why do we cheerfully hand over our private information? Fister observes:

“Here’s the interesting paradox: The only way to increase the intellectual property value of your identity is to give it away. That’s the only way it can be shared, linked to and recognized by others. Trading a little personal information for a public platform, whether for personal expression or self-promotion (or both), seems a fair exchange.”

Fister draws a parallel with the Open Access movement, which seeks to make academic publications (journal articles, books etc) freely available online.

The “privately owned digital public sphere is a fertile if febrile commons where millions of people play out their identities and share ideas… Scholars and librarians champion the value of free and open exchange of ideas for the public good. It’s time to take those values beyond the academy. If we made an effort to help the public understand the tradeoffs we make to be part of the digital social sphere, maybe we’d all think more critically about how our public identities are formed and exploited – for what they are worth.”

This led me to Johnny Lee’s website where software and instructions on doing all these things are free, and to some thoughts in regard to the Information Commission:

- This is an interesting display of creating and sharing useful information on (I imagine) just about anything – his contributions are favoured by thousands of replies. Food for thought for our knowledge transfer agenda?

- He reflects in his blog on the usefulness of mass help – hundreds of people have put their thoughts on further ideas for Wii based projects. How do we deal with a world where information creation can be aggregated from many people and many tiny inputs? What does this mean in terms of tools for information creation? For ownership/attribution of the end product?

- He has done work in foldable displays (see video on the academic site). Food for thought on containers for information. This is still too primitive for good e-books, but perhaps is a pointer to the day when items that “work” like paper books are possible?

- He publishes in journals but also produces a short video for most of his academic publications. What are the implications of such activity for scholarly publishing? With the new generation of NetGen students and researchers, will academics expect and need to produce multimedia explanations/marketing to draw attention to their research and/or teaching?