Preserving Government Information

Spotlight on Digital Government Information Preservation: Examining the Context, Outcomes, Limitations, and Successes of the DataRefuge Movement  by Eric Johnson and Alicia Kubas examines the issues around preserving access to government information through the lens of the DataRefuge movement. Below the fold, some commentary.

Bad Identifiers

This post on persistent identifiers (PIDs) has been sitting in my queue in note form for far too long. Its re-animation was sparked by an excellent post at PLOS Biologue by Julie McMurry, Lilly Winfree and Melissa Haendel entitled Bad Identifiers are the Potholes of the Information Superhighway: Take-Home Lessons for Researchers, which draws attention to a paper, Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data, of which they are three of the many authors. In addition, there were two papers at this year's iPRES on the topic;

• Remco van Veenendaal et al's Getting Persistent Identifiers Implemented By ‘Cutting In The Middle-Man’ describes how the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (DHN) worked with vendors to implement PIDs.
• Angela Dappert and Adam Farquhar's Permanence of the Scholarly Record: Persistent Identification and Digital Preservation – A Roadmap is a view from the British Library on how PIDs and digital preservation can be better integrated.

Below the fold, some thoughts on PIDs.

Analysis of Sci-Hub Downloads

Bastian Greshake has a post at the LSE's Impact of Social Sciences blog based on his F1000Research paper Looking into Pandora's Box. In them he reports on an analysis combining two datasets released by Alexandra Elbakyan:

• A 2016 dataset of 28M downloads from Sci-Hub between September 2015 and February 2016.
• A 2017 dataset of 62M DOIs to whose content Sci-Hub claims to be able to provide access.

Below the fold, some extracts and commentary.

Why Did Institutional Repositories Fail?

Richard Poynder has a blogpost introducing a PDF containing a lengthy introduction that expands on the blog post and a Q&A with Cliff Lynch on the history and future of Institutional Repositories (IRs). Richard and Cliff agree that IRs have failed to achieve the hopes that were placed in them at their inception in a 1999 meeting at Santa Fe, NM. But they disagree about what those hopes were. Below the fold, some commentary.

The Panopticon Is Good For You

As Stanford staff I get a feel-good email every morning full of stuff about the wonderful things Stanford is doing. Last Thursday's linked to this article from the medical school about Stanford's annual Big Data in Biomedicine conference. It is full of gee-whiz speculation about how the human condition can be improved if massive amounts of data is collected about every human on the planet and shared freely among medical researchers. Below the fold, I give a taste of the speculation and, in my usual way, ask what could possibly go wrong?

PREMIS & LOCKSS

We were asked if the CLOCKSS Archive uses PREMIS metadata. The answer is no, and a detailed explanation is below the fold.

In-browser emulation

Jeff Rothenberg's ground-breaking 1995 article Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents described and compared two techniques to combat format obsolescence; format migration and emulation, concluding that emulation was the preferred approach. As time went by and successive digital preservation systems went into production it became clear that almost all of them rejected Jeff's conclusion, planning to use format migration as their preferred response to format obsolescence. Follow me below the fold for a discussion on why this happened and whether it still makes sense.

Talk on LOCKSS Metadata Extraction at IIPC 2013

I gave a brief introduction to the way the LOCKSS daemon extracts metadata from the content it collects at the 2013 IIPC General Assembly. Below the fold is an edited text with links to the sources.