Energy Efficient ICT
I learnt all sort of things last week at a workshop in Cardiff. The power consumption of various bits of an average server for instance.
Power supply unit - 38w
Fan - 10w
CPU - 80w
Memory - 36w
Disks - 12w
Slots - 50w
Motherboard - 25w
I learnt that you lose roughly 50% of the power that you pay for by the time that it gets to your server.
I learnt that they were cooling hot computer components with water back in the 1960’s, so any (entirely understandable) fears you might have about scary amounts of electricity mixing with water in your state-of-the-art data centre … relax.
And much else besides. The workshop was called ‘Sustainable IT in Universities and Colleges: Energy Efficient Configuration, Cooling and Power Supply in Data Centres.’
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2008/06/sustainableit.aspx
Funded by JISC, run by Peter James as part of the SusteIT initiative, and hosted by Hugh Beedie at Cardiff university, there were about 50 participants from a range of institutions and from a mix of IT and Estates departments, the coming-together of which would be a laudable outcome in its own right, never mind the content of the workshop!
There was a great to deal to consider, but one thing stood out very clearly from the presentations. The most sustainable, energy efficient, and ultimately the cheapest way of dealing with the storage and access of digital information is to do it at scale, with state of the art equipment, in Scotland.
Pardon? … yes, in Scotland apparently. The weather is colder in Scotland and if, as Mike Brown (University of Edinburgh) explained, you install a system where you can use the outside ambient temperature to take over from your chiller units when it gets cold enough to render inside air conditioning pointless, then the rather bracing Scottish climate could end up saving you a great heap of money. He has figures, and evidence … it’s all very plausible.
Neil Grindley
Digital Preservation Programme Manager
A repository of university committee papers
The KCL Committee Zone project is one of the Start Up and Enhancement projects in the JISC repositories and preservation programme. The project is drawing to a close and has developed a repository to store the agendas, minutes and papers that are produced for the various committees of King’s College London.
The project held a dissemination event on the 10th where the repository was demonstrated. I think a few points from their demonstration are worth highlighting.
- The metadata scheme chosen is a reduced set of the e-government metadata standard, based on qualified dublin core.
- The repository only uses 11 metadata fields for the items stored in the repository. This means that the deposit process is only one screen and is not a great burden on the committee administrators who will be depositing. This lightweight approach is the result of working very closely with the committee administrators using focus groups and one on one sessions.
- The metadata collected is contextual information, not about search as the repository has a powerful full text search.
- Advocacy for this type of repository is still important. KCL committee zone have got good buy in so far due to the way they have involved the committee administrators in the project but there is still more advocacy required. This was highlighted by someone from the audience who pointed out that their similar project had struggled for buy in.
The other speakers at their dissemination event came from the BSI and from Islington council, they were both using complex document management systems to manage their committees. These presentations were very interesting as both seemed to focus strongly on the services offered to their staff and fitting or improving existing workflows. Both were using commercial content management systems and it seems that repository work in the HE environment could benefit from studying the workflow tools that they can offer.
Harvesting usage data?
I was talking with a researcher the other day who said that, despite his institution mandating deposit of research papers in his institutional repository, he didn’t comply - prefering to deposit in an international subject repository. Naturally, I asked him ‘why?’. He said that it was because he wanted each of his papers to be in one, and only one, place on the web, so that he could get accurate download statistics for it. Obviously, we’re aware in the JISC IE team of the various arguments on this topic, and we’ve funded a piece of work to look at the practical ways in which subject and institutional repositories might work together, which could address this issue among others. We’ve also funded various projects on repository statistics, such as ‘Interoperable Repository Statistics’ (which has developed a tool that repository managers can use to analyse and share statistics) and an ongoing small piece of work on harmonising article-level usage data formats. There is also MESUR and other projects in this space.
However, in the real world, it is likely that copies of some research papers are likely to be at various places on the web, and we wondered whether a tool could be built that used fuzzy matching to identify copies that were probably the same paper, some means of querying the servers on which they sat to get download data, and a reliable way of then aggregating that data into some acceptable statistics. Is that an important use case? Is feasible to build something that addresses it?
What’s the relationship (if any) with name authority services (see the JISC pilot Names project) or persistent identifiers (see the JISC Resourcing Identifier Interoperability for Repositories - RIDIR demonstrator)?
Bringing repositories to the attention of university senior managers
There are two new JISC briefing papers on repositories. One is concerned with the benefits of managing and sharing learning objects, the other with managing and sharing research outputs.
JISC and UUK are sending these papers to senior managers in universities next week. The papers should arrive on desks on Monday 16th of June. With any luck, the briefing papers will pique some interest in repositories or at least make sure the concept is familiar to senior managers.
This may represent an opportunity for capitalising on this familiarity or interest with further advocacy directed at senior managers about repository services, policies or projects.
The recipients are likely to be:
- Vice Chancellors,
- DVC Academic,
- DVC Research,
- University Secretary,
- Deans of Schools
Plus some of:
- Records Manager,
- Dean of the Graduate Research School,
- Director of ICT Systems,
- Director of Library& Information Services,
- Director Academic Enterprise,
- Principal Lecturer Pathfinder E-Learning (central post)
The briefing papers can be found on the JISC website:
Learning objects: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/elearningrepositoriesbpv1.aspx
Research: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/researchrepositoriesbpv1.aspx
Open Standards
I recently attended two completely separate but thematically related events on the nature of openness within digital technology. The first of these was a lecture by Jonathan Zittrain entitled ‘The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It’ - organised by the Oxford Internet Institute. His central contention was that we are increasingly seeing corporations designing technology that cannot easily be manipulated by its users to allow them to do new and unanticipated things. The phrase he uses for such prescriptive technology is ‘non-generative’, one example of this being (in Zittrain’s opinion) the Apple iPhone. (You can read more about this at http://futureoftheinternet.org/)
The second event took place in the Hague a couple of weeks ago and was convened by an organisation which calls itself Digistan (http://www.digistan.org/). This group is also concerned about the degrees of openness apparent in the digital realm and has placed a clear statement of intent on their website in the form of ‘The Hague Declaration’. (http://www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en)
This decalaration calls on governments to:
1. Procure only information technology that implements free and open standards
2. Deliver e-government services based exclusively on free and open standards
3. Use only free and open digital standards in their own activities
Strong stuff … and interesting, particularly when you consider that a representative of the Netherlands government was at the meeting and handing out copies of a booklet entitled ‘The Netherlands in Open Connection: An action plan for the use of Open Standards and Open Source Software in the public and semi-public sector’ (http://appz.ez.nl/publicaties/pdfs/07ET15.pdf).
It’s got me thinking about where JISC stands in relation to all this. I had another look at the JISC standards catalogue which is currently hosted by UKOLN (http://standards-catalogue.ukoln.ac.uk/index/Standards_Approach). It states:
“Despite the acknowledged importance of open standards, it was also recognised that the selection and use of open standards is not always easy. There is an awareness that not all open standards gain widespread acceptance and that adoption of open standards before they have proven their reliability and gained widespread acceptance can be costly.”
So there you go, we’re firmly on the fence! But there again, we do state that we have a policy of asking projects to either use open standards or justify whey they aren’t, which sounds exactly like the way the man from the Dutch government was talking at the start of the meeting. “Comply or Explain” was his approach. So perhaps we aren’t so far away afterall. One thing that certainly emerged from this meeting for me was that it would probably be helpful to have some kind of framework for determining how open a standard actually is. Perhaps something for inclusion into the next phase of development for the standards catalogue?
ORE@JISC
With the release of the beta OAI-ORE specification this week, I thought it was worth highlighting some of the JISC work in the UK that is contributing to this initiative. Two short projects are looking to experiment with ORE and feed back into its development. The FORESITE project at Liverpool, run by Rob Sanderson, has produced ORE resource map descriptions of the JSTOR collection (1.8 million full text articles), and will also ORE-enable the DSpace repository platform, depositing the JSTOR-ORE collection into DSpace using the SWORD protocol. The Theorem project, based at Cambridge and run by Jim Downing, is looking at etheses, both representing ‘ideal’ born-digital theses as ORE resource maps, and looking at workflows around these. This project is working closely with the Integrated Content Environment (ICE) developed by Peter Sefton at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, to create an authoring and management environment that produces and handles chemistry theses as born-digital objects, with live links to data, and so on. This work complements an international project led in the UK by Chris Awre, and involving partners from the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, which is looking to get some international agreement on a complex object format for theses, drawing from the ORE specifications, but building on specifications currently used, such as x-metadiss in Germany. Given the relative simplicity of doctoral theses – they have limited versioning issues for example – and the pressing need in many countries to automate the thesis workflow, it may be that theses become an early ORE adopter.