At the European Digitisation workshop in December last year, Paul Ayris (who is the LIFE Project Director) was interviewed. He explored some important challenges facing national and university libraries across the continent.The podcast of the interview is available from the JISC website.At the workshop I also gave a presentation on LIFE, which is available from the documentation page.
Based in the simply stunning Accademia Nationale Dei Lincei in Rome, this DELOS conference covered a diverse and highly informative cross section of speakers all facing the challenges of appraising electronic archives. Focusing mainly in the archive world but with strong input from both libraries and Universities it covered topics from appraising Art databases through to Scientific records.
I was there representing both the British Library using our recently completed risk assessment of digital objects as well as LIFE2, it was the first time the two had been used together and it seemed to work well. I underlined the LIFE project methodologies strength in helping repositories assess both the cost but also the areas of main activity within any archive.
The example I use most often to illustrate this is the VDEP analysis that was done for LIFE, even though the costs may not in all cases be 100% accurate the model still is able to identify where the most cost is gathered. In this particular case it was in the metadata creation which helped us highlight areas where future savings may be made, or where tool development could be focused to help reduce future costs.
The conclusions were that appraisal is a word used in many different ways, there is the traditional archiving use through to more modern electronic means and even went as far as a 3D model which plotted levels of activity within an archive based upon how many documents you send or recieve. Basically it put you on a map that kind of looked like the solar system and based upon your workrate you moved into or out of the picture…you have been warned.
The two day conference was a great success and it was a pleasure to be there.
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As part of his keynote address at the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) Conference, Paul Ayris (Director of UCL Library Services and LIFE Project Director) included a section on LIFE. The presentation is available from the UCL repository, and a paper will follow in the near future. The conference ran from 9 to 12 September. |
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Yesterday evening the LIFE Team attended the 2007 Conservation Awards at the British Museum. LIFE was one of five projects shortlisted for the Digital Preservation Award which recognises, “leadership and practical advancement in the digital preservation arena.” Congratulations to The National Archives which won the award for DROID and PRONOM. |
Update: The 2007 Conservation Awards newsletter (Dispatch) has now been released from the main website, it contains summaries of all the projects involved in the awards.
LIBER have recently launched their new website which contains a page on the LIFE Project. We presented a paper to the LIBER Conference in
