Posted by: Neil Grindley

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

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.

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)?

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

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?

This was the first of 6 programme meetings that will be delivered by the projects rather than programme managers and, in my opinion, it was a roaring success.

You can read summaries of the day produced by Nick Sheppard of the Leeds Met Repository project and Julian Beckton of the Lirolem project. The day started with 6 quickfire introductions to the Lirolem, Circle, DRaW, YSJ Digirep and Faroes projects and an overview of the issues with learning and teaching repositories from Andrew Rothery (of the University of Worcester) and Phil Barker (of JISC CETIS). We also had two impromtu introductions to the POCKET and Edspace projects. It ws interesting to note that all of these projects were adopting a different approach to the implementation of a repository:

• Julian Beckton presented the Lirolem project. They have developed an collaborative working space for architects that has a deposit facility straight into the repository and the repository itself has an interesting interface for displaying compound objects.
• Steve Burholt presented the Circle project. It has made the repository itself largely invisible and have focused on building interfaces for specific purposes such as basic search and a really nice search and reuse interface to the repository from inside their VLE.
• Sarah Hayes talked about the DRaW project. They are focusing on consulting with staff to produce a service that they would find useful as they have had a learning and teaching repository for 3 years but have not experienced significant usage. This compares badly to the research repository that has been in place for less than a year and is getting much heavier usage.
• Helen Westmancoat from the YSJ Digirep project has focused on a number of specific collections in their institution, this has had the benefit of promoting widespread interest amongst the other parts of the instiution.
• Dave Millard spoke about the Faroes project. They have adopted a very lightweight approach, focused on hosting an academics learning assets and providing web 2.0 features on the platform. They have chosen a minimal approach to metadata and shifted the focus of the repository from metadata to the object.
• Sarah Malone got up to talk about POCKET and how it is turning existing learning materials into Open Content using the Open University’s OpenLearn platform.
• Debra Morris introduced Edspace, which is a large institutional exemplar project that is aiming to develop a sustainable solution that is firmly embedded in institutional culture and infrastructure.

The afternoon session focused on using the experiences of the delegates to try and prepare a list of recommendations for people implementing a learning and teaching repository. The outcomes of this discussion will be turned into a document that can be shared. This will complement the structured guidelines for starting a learning and teaching repository produced by the CD-LOR project.

The slides from the event, the audio recordings and the recommendations will all be available from the DRaW website in due course.

I learned an awful lot at the event and it was really gratifying that the tone of discussions became more optimistic as the day wore on. From my conversations with delegates the day was really useful to them and I am looking forward to the remaining events in this series (see more details in this earlier post). I think that this type of event will complement the more traditional JISC programme meeting in a way that is beneficial to JISC programme objectives and to the projects.

(I realise this is a PDF file, which won’t please everyone, but shrunk the filesize by over an order of magnitude from MS Word)

The starting point for the workshop was a recognition that, while research data orients largely by (sub)discipline, the way in which infrastructure is developed and funded is often oriented nationally, or even around institutions. Some way is needed to square these two. I have to confess that, on the day, I wasn’t sure we’d made a lot of progress, but in drafting the notes I changed my mind somewhat. Certainly, Peter Murray-Rust seemed to identify the academic department infrastructure as a key point where intervention could serve both that department and the wider goal of data curation and sharing. The photos of flip chart diagrams are perhaps not easy to read or understand, but suggest a distinctive place for libraries and repositories.

Greg Crane’s Perseus project anticipated some of the topics that were covered later - notably how to design an infrastructure that is sustainable and yet adaptive - there are a few ideas in the notes. there are also a few ideas about how the problem space might be broken down so that an international approach can be taken, though this remains difficult. With luck and effort, JISC’s and other UK ‘data’ work will join up with that in the US (eg the NSF Datanet programme), Australia (Australian National Data Service), etc, and these notes will help us do that.

Many thanks to the workshop participants, listed at the end of the notes.

The problem that the project is addressing is that very useful web resources are produced by research projects. However when the project funding stops the maintenance of the resources often stops. This means that the resources start to decay, broken links flourish and the usefulness of the resource deteriorates quickly.

ReStore aims to address this problem by accepting suitable resources after a review process and then hosting and curating the sites with a mixture of automated and manual processes.

The project is funded by ESRC and aims to produce a prototype repository that curates a few web resources that have been produced by other ESRC projects.

The workshop was chiefly concerned with introducing the project and discussing some of the major issues such as technical challenges, IPR and sustainability. The presentations from the day can be downloaded from the project website: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/restore/slides/. These include some mockups of the proposed system and an overview of the proposed review and curation process.

The project’s work on development of a long-term strategy for ESRC in sustaining on-line resources will be very relevant to JISC.

The technical challenges in hosting a range of resources that may all use different software and hardware are significant and it may be better in the short term to use Amazon Web Services or a similar service to host the sites and avoid a large hardware bill.