10 Downing St on AHDS...

How exciting to receive an email from 10 Downing St this morning! It tells me that "The Prime Minister's Office has responded to [the AHDS] petition and you can view it here"

This refers to the AHRC's decision to cease funding the AHDS, which this blog discussed earlier. I signed the petition, the details of which were:

"On 11 May 2007, Professor Phillip Esler, Chief Executive of the AHRC, wrote to University Vice-Chancellors informing them of the Council's decision to withdraw funding from the AHDS after eleven years. The AHDS has pioneered and encouraged awareness and use among Britain's university researchers in the arts and humanities of best practice in preserving digital data created by research projects funded by public money. It has also ensured that this data remains publically available for future researchers. It is by no means evident that a suitable replacement infrastructure will be established and the AHRC appears to have taken no adequate steps to ensure the continued preservation of this data. The AHDS has also played a prominent role in raising awareness of new technologies and innovative practices among UK researchers. We believe that the withdrawal of funding for this body is a retrogade step which will undermine attempts to create in Britain a knowledge economy based on latest technologies. We ask the Prime Minister to urge the AHRC to reconsider this decision."

The Prime Minister's response is:

"Thank you for your e-petition.

"Government policy is that decisions on such services are a matter for the Research Council concerned.

"The Government expects that such decisions would only be taken after a careful review of the service in question. We are aware that the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) only took the decision to cease funding the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) after detailed consideration. The Council concluded at its March 2007 meeting that having regard both to the performance and cost of AHDS, this was not something they should continue to fund. There are no grounds for the Government seeking to ask the Council to reconsider that decision."

Well, I guess those who wrote and those who signed the petition didn't expect much more than this. But I think I have yet to see any "suitable replacement infrastructure" and the AHRC still "appears to have taken no adequate steps to ensure the continued preservation of this data".

Arts and Humanities Data Service... next steps?

In an earlier post, I mentioned the decision by the AHRC (and later JISC) to cease funding the
AHDS from March 2008. Since then the AHRC have re-affirmed their decision. On 28 June, the Future Histories of the Moving Image Research Network made public an open letter to the AHRC, to no avail it would appear.

In her response to the announcements, Sheila Anderson (Director of AHDS) wrote:

"In the meantime, and at least until 31st March 2008, the AHDS will continue to give advice and guidance on all matters relating to the creation of digital content arising from or supporting research, teaching and learning across the arts and humanities, including technical and metadata standards and project management. If you have a data creation project, please do not hesitate to contact us for advice.

The AHDS will continue to work with those creating important digital resources to advise on the best methods for keeping these valuable resources available and accessible for the long-term in a form that encourages their further use for answering new research questions, and their use in teaching and learning. This advice will include exploring with content creators and owners suitable repositories in which they might deposit their materials for long term curation and preservation, and how to ensure that their materials can continue to be discovered and used by the wider community. If you are currently in negotiation with the AHDS to deposit your digital collection, please continue to work with us to ensure the future sustainability and accessibility of your resource.

The AHDS will continue to make available its rich collection of digital content for use in research, teaching and learning, and to preserve those collections in its care. The AHDS intends to discuss with the JISC and the AHRC the long term future of these collections beyond April 2008 with the intention of securing their continued preservation and availability."

This is a great expression of commitment, and deserves our support. However, the lack of long-term funding must raise questions of sustainability.

Explicit in the AHRC's decision was the view that the community is mature enough to manage its own resources. There is doubt in many people's minds about this, but we are effectively stuck with it. So what are the implications? There are implications both for existing collections and for future arts and humanities resources. I would like to spend a few paragraphs thinking about the existing collections.

AHDS is not monolithic; it is comprised of several separate services (I suspect in what follows I may be using historical rather than current names). We already know that AHRC is privileging the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), which will continue to receive some funding (and which has a diverse funding base), so their resources are presumably safe. The History Data Service (HDS) resources are embedded within the UK Data Archive (which has recently received an additional 5 years funding from ESRC); it would presumably cost more to de-accession those resources than to keep preserving them and making them available, so even if HDS can take no more resources, the existing ones should be safe. Literature, Language and Linguistics is closely related to the Oxford Text Archive; I imagine the same kinds of arguments would apply there.

I have heard suggestions that Kings College London might continue to support the AHDS Executive for a period, and it appears there are some discussions with JISC about some kind of support "to ensure the expertise and achievements of the AHDS are not lost to the community".

That leaves Performing Arts and Visual Arts; I can't even surmise what their future might be, since I don't know enough about their funding and local environment.

I appreciate that it's still early days, and no doubt crucial discussions are going on behind the scenes. But if any part of AHDS resources are in danger of loss, the resource owners need to consider plans to deal with those resources in the future. This will take some time, particularly since for more complex resources, it is clear that existing repositories are generally NOT yet adequate for purpose. I guess the picture itself will be complex; I can think of at least these categories:

• Some resources still exist outside of AHDS, and no action may be needed.
• Some resources will not be felt worth re-homing.
• Some resources can be re-homed in the time and funding institutions have available.
• Some resources should be re-homed, provided that time and funding are provided by some external source (this might be for developments on an institutional repository; it might be for work on the resource to fit a new non-AHDS environment).

I tried to find out what resources were deposited by the University of Edinburgh. It's not an easy search, but ignoring a bunch of stuff where the University was only peripherally mentioned, I came up with:

1. HOTBED (Handing on Tradition By Electronic Dissemination) pa-1028-1
2. Lemba Archaeological Project arch-279-1
3. Gateway to the Archives of Scottish Higher Education (GASHE) exec-1003-1
4. Avant-Garde/Neo-Avant-Garde Bibliographic Research Database lll-2503-1
5. Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563-1736 hist-4667-1
6. National Sample from the 1851 Census of Great Britain hist-1316-1

HOTBED appears on further research to be a RSAMD project that ended in 2004; however, a Google search produced a web site (http://www.hotbed.ac.uk/) that did not appear to be functional this afternoon. GASHE still exists as a working resource, so far as I can tell, and anyway is run from Glasgow. Lemba is archaeology, and so maybe safe. The Avant-Garde bibliography still exists separately. The two history resources seem safe.

Are we OK? Is there more? Who knows! I think we need much better tools to tell what is "at risk", so that plans can start being made. Of course, this could be happening, maybe I'm just not "in the loop".

Will AHRC consider bids for funding transitional work? I certainly hope so, although I don't know how this might be done. JISC is (I believe) planning one last round of its Capital Programme. Will they include provisions to enhance repositories so as to take these more complex resources? I certainly hope so!

Arts and Humanities Data Service decision

On 14 May 2007, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) issued a rather strange press release, announcing that “AHRC Council has decided to cease funding the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) from March 2008” and at the same time announcing a change to its conditions of grant relating to deposit, removing the condition that material be offered for deposit in AHDS, although “Grant holders must make materials they had planned to deposit with the AHDS available in an accessible depository for at least three years after the end of their grant”.

This is a strange decision from a number of points of view. The first is the way it has been announced, the short period of notice (a call for proposals was currently open, closing in June), and the sudden-death cutoff of funds. Yes, there was a funding crisis, but the speed of the decision makes any sensible exit strategy for the AHDS difficult or impossible to work through… and it doesn’t appear that the AHRC is going to help create one.

Secondly it is strange because the Arts and Humanities (I’ll shorten to “the Arts” for simplicity) represent discipline areas that use and rely on a wide variety of resource types. Unlike many of the sciences, journals do not represent the most significant part of output or input in the Arts and Humanities. The monograph has always been important as a research output, but is now under threat through the pressure on the library cost base from the journals pricing crisis, and must change (and the discipline with it) or die. One way it is changing is to become virtual, and in the process to become richer… just the sort of complex resources the AHDS was set up to capture and curate. And at the same time, input has been a wide variety of resources, extending well beyond libraries to include museums, galleries, archives, theatres, dance halls, street corners… wherever the expressive power of human creativity is apparent. Many of the resources studied have been very poorly represented in traditional monographs, and can be much better represented for critical discussion in a rich digital form.

Thirdly it’s strange in its assumption that other “accessible depositories” (a term few of us have heard before; we think they might mean institutional repositories) can take up the missing role. One of the problems for the AHDS has always been the result of what is described in my previous paragraph: the resources offered are sometimes very complex web sites, based on (sometimes arbitrary) use of a wide variety of technologies, and the capture and curation of these has been a challenge which has required the AHDS to build up a considerable skill base. This skill base is just not available to the operators of UK institutional repositories, which so far have struggled to ingest mostly simple text objects (eprints). They will not easily fill this gap; they simply cannot ingest the sort of resources the AHDS has been dealing with, given their current and likely future resources. Only 5 of them even claim to include datasets, and few of those actually do; a slightly larger number claim to support “special” items, but again nothing complex is apparent on inspection. So the alternatives available to Arts researchers are few (or none).

Oddly the AHRC has not yet (I believe) dropped the condition that the AHDS must help applicants with a “Technical Annex”, supposed to ensure that created resources are easier for it to manage once they become available. Will they expect the AHDS to continue to do this once no longer funded by them? If not, who else will do this? Is there any conceivable way that institutional repositories could take up this role? Not obviously to me!

Fourthly, it is strange in its new assumption that 3 years post grant is a sufficient requirement: this in a discipline area that uses resources from hundreds of years ago!

Finally (for now), this decision is worrying because of the precedent it sets. Subject-based data centres have one great advantage: they can be staffed to provide domain knowledge that is essential for managing and preserving that subject or disciplines data resources. Institutional repositories by contrast are necessarily staffed by generalists, often librarians, who will struggle to deal with the wide variety of data resources they might be required to manage in widely differing ways. IRs have always had (to my mind) a sustainability advantage: they represent the intellectual output of an institution (good promotional and internal value), and they sit within the institutional knowledge infrastructure. Even if one institution decides to drop its IR, the academic knowledge base as a whole is not fatally damaged in any particular discipline. Subject data centres by contrast have always suffered from the disadvantage that their future was uncertain; their sustainability model has always been weak. Now that disadvantage has moved from potential to stark reality in the Arts and Humanities, one of the discipline areas most requiring access to a wide variety of outputs from the past.

If this decision worries you, there is a petition for UK citizens at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AHDSfunding/, which I would urge you to sign. We also need to think hard about ways in which we can deal with the effects of the decision. It is difficult to challenge a major funder, but there are times when it needs to be done. We have to get this right!

[I should have added that Seamus Ross, who is responsible for a small part of the AHDS at Glasgow, is a colleague on the DCC Management Team. However, this posting is made in a personal capacity; while I believe my views may be shared, I have not attempted to get agreement from colleagues on the sentiments expressed.]