But winning projects bring with them their own problems too. Project directors see the possibilities for more content, better tools, enhanced functionality – and as the website grows there is requirement for a mature supporting infrastructure in things like authentication, improved licensing, continual marketing and communication. And perhaps most importantly of all, developing income to help pay for this.

UK universities are filled with successful digital projects that have ambitious plans to expand: WikiVet (open resources for Vets), Galaxy Zoo (crowdsourcing in astronomy), the E-Enlightenment (presenting the Enlightenment as a social network), Vision of Britain (information on Britain’s town and geographies).

Behind each of these projects, there is a passionate team, many of whom have a research role within their university. But here’s the rub. When the website starts to expand, the researchers behind the project have to get involved in the issues involved above – the copyright wars, the battles with authentication. And this means they have less time to actually do the research work that they are appointed to the university for in the first place.

This causes problems both for the individual and for the institution. Something successful is happening, but it’s not necessarily progressing the individual’s career in the way she expected nor responding to the apparent strategic needs of the university. And yet because of the success of the website, new research is happening and the institution is gaining kudos.

To get round this, we need to start defining new roles within universities – digital entrepreneurs. People who are tasked with taking forward all the new challenges; people that cannot really be tied down to specific research nor teaching roles and yet maintain an close connection to them.

These positions don’t have to be full time – they could be combined with more traditional roles – but it is essential for universities and projects to acknowledge and nurture such roles if we are wanting the digital presence of education to flourish.

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My prejudice is that a lot of humanistic, social science, and scientific thinking is rooted in confirming our prejudices through complex theories that may or may not have grounding beyond our prejudices.   On the humanistic side, we often go with our intuitions rather than our evidence and it feels a little like the parable of the blind men and the elephant.  We grab hold of what we know and thing that is the whole animal.   Something similar can happen in empirical thinking where you measure what is closest at hand and are convinced that proves whatever you extrapolate from that which happens to be nearest to you. 

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• RDMF5: Economics of Applying and Sustaining Digital Curation and
• JISC MRD programme workshop Costs, Benefits and Sustainability.

Roles and responsibilities were a key theme. Is data management the concern of researchers, their institutions, funders or disciplinary data centres? At the RDMF, Jeff Haywood, Vice Principal for Knowledge Management at University of Edinburgh, described the institution as the place of last resort for preserving data. They hope to direct researchers to external data centres where possible but are concerned to keep a register of the data so they know where their assets are and can act to secure these if external services are under the threat of closure.

A breakout session at the RDMF on institutional solutions versus national data centres reached a similar conclusion. It isn’t a matter of choice – we have to live with a mixed landscape. It was argued there should be more services at local level: a sort of first step data management service. A series of handovers could then scale up to various levels as appropriate based on the nature of the data, the available infrastructure and the specific requirements of each case. Jeff’s argument holds well in this scenario – HEIs don’t need to provide a complete infrastructure, just add to existing provision where required and most importantly know what they own and where this is.

At the JISC workshop, Andrew Bush of KPMG addressed how costs can be built into research funding bids when there’s a gap in provision.  He recommended that data management support costs should be recovered through indirects, as this is apparently where research councils see them being placed. He advised not to class data management infrastructure as research facilities, as the cost of these should only be applied when the facility is used by a project – not on every bid – so you need to work at capacity. Also, as projects typically draw on data management infrastructure once finished, it’s better to include this as an indirect cost. It seems research funders are willing to meet data management costs but it’s quite an untested area so examples of how people have costed in support would be welcome.

One aspect where headway has been made is in defining some of those costs. The JISC MRD projects have been asked to identify researcher needs and pilot services to address these. At Leicester they’ve been investigating the provision of ‘good enough’ data centres, which provide robust but cheaper storage to researchers. The cost comparison was £400 per Tb per year versus the usual £1 a Gb a day on university SANs. Jonathan Tedds reported that the reception to this has been overwhelming, as researchers often struggle to manage their own storage and back-up efficiently. Comparable charges were noted by other JISC projects too.

More work is underway across the MRD programme on defining benefits and business models for sustainability. This will be presented at the International workshop in Birmingham in March 2011.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
Pew on Social Media and Young Adults
Dan on sustainability in last section of “The Idols of Scholarly Publishing”

Running time: 52:50
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Links mentioned on the podcast:

David Pogue’s New York Times review of the iPad
In Our Time, “The City”
New NEH Digital Start Up Grants at edwired.org
JISC crowdsourcing projects
Integrating Digital Papyrology Project
Civil War Washington

Running time: 1:06:50
Download the .mp3