ANADP II Part 10: Closing Plenary by Adam Farquhar

Trends and Impact

Farquhar’s (British Library) work has 3 strands: BL team, Planets project, Open PLANETS foundation

  • High-value tech & practitioner exchange, Sustainability New CEO (Ed Fahey)
  • Dataset/Datasite (BL): Research infrastructure & capacity
  • Digital Scholarship: new services, use digital content in new ways.

On to the meeting:

Intellectual honesty is our frame! (Follow the IIPC example: BE NICE!)

  • Inclusion of service providers/vendors–how do we make them welcome?
  • Structure: some action sessions were more project based
  • Gap: Do we have: a consensus on what it means to align? Single clear global voice + national voice? Right folks to influence national legislation?
  • We have underestimated the amount of work it takes
  • Smaller scale collaboration across national boundaries
  • Improved use, shared maintenance = Big impact
  • It’s super-important to handle the legal stuff
  • Organizational axis!
  • Standards: choose wisely. Standards should follow practice.
  • Few discussions about technical underpinnings here
  • Focus on cost, rather than value
  • Bottlenecks are interesting.
  • Challenge: Can we take 50% off the costs of DP?
  • Education and training
  • Alignment — reducing variation & redundancy
  • Don’t lose the voice of evaluation
  • Interdependence: threat or menace? It must be carefully managed.

Trends!

  • Non print legal deposit & regulations for data management plans
  • Shift to business as usual: operational budgets & teams, capital investment in digital infrastructure
  • Often with external service providers
  • Shift to born-digital
  • Greater scale
  • New usage pattern: from single items to dataset(s) analysis
  • Architecture needs to be constructed for these new use patterns
  • Digital library architectures will feel very 1990s soon.
  • OAIS may need a re-think in light of this use
  • Assume more/everything gets looked at! Implementers will need to think differently
  • Reduced funding, growing market problem: Not only a memory institution. Spreading in importance! Personal Digital Archiving solutions create additional pressure for 30 year access.
  • Open thinking about the role of vendors/service providers: opportunity to drive down costs
  • Shift from project thinking to infrastructure funding. Infrastructure can be invisible: we don’t want to disappear.

What’s next?

  • We can be effective … or cheer
  • Legal: (mostly cheering)
  • What can we learn from RDA? Should we hang our coat on that hook? Join an interest group?
  • Worry about our loss of identity/community? It’s an interesting structure, the working group model
  • Education & Training! The economics of it. Think about cost sinks? Engaging more broadly may cost more money, but it’s worth it.
  • Our message & coherence: we need to communicate our consensus messages
  • SCOPE: we’ve been drawing our boundaries too tight
  • This is a scary problem! We narrow things down & put out boundaries to make it less so.
  • Soup-to-nuts handling needs sorting out.
  • So does selection & access

And with that, we were sent out to try to change the world of DP. 🙂

 

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