forum: After the AHDS: The End of National Support?
With the planned end of the AHRC ICT Methods Network and the unplanned withdrawal of funding from the AHDS, the UK, from having an exceptionally strong system of national infrastructure support for ICT in Arts and Humanities research, will have almost none at all. The problems and issues that arise as a result of this, and the actions that can be taken to deal with them are the focus of a panel session at DRHA 2007:
David Robey (Chair: Director of the AHRC ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Prgramme) will address the broad strategic questions and prospects, Lorna Hughes (Manager, AHRC ICT Methods Network) will present the Methods Network’s legacy plan, and David Shepherd (Director, University of Sheffield Humanities Research Institute) will focus on the view from HEIs and the contribution that they can make.
We have set up this thread to continue the discussion from DRHA and allow the community to have a say in it. Attached are the slides from Lorna Hughes' presentation.
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withdrawl of funding from the AHDS
A little background information on the AHRC's decision to stop funding the AHDS:
Council believes that Arts and Humanities researchers have developed significant IT knowledge and expertise in the past decade. [...] Much that generally can be safely assumed now, for example that web sites can be put together and run effectively for the duration of a project, could not be assumed ten years ago. Council believes that long term storage of digital materials and sustainability is best dealt with by an active engagement with HEIs rather than through a centralised service.
AHRC Council has decided to cease funding AHDS from March 2008
JISC to review its services
Open letter from members of Antiquist, Digital Classicist, the Text Encoding Initiative and Digital Medievalist to the AHRC.
Open letter from the Future Histories of the Moving Image Research Network.
Open letter (RTF) from the Association for History and Computing UK.
Report: After the AHDS: the end of national support?
A panel discussion at the opening of the recent Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference at Dartington College of the Arts posed the question what happens after the end of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS); is this the end of national support?
The Arts and Humanities Data Service is a national service with the primary role to preserve, curate, and provide access to the digital output of the humanities in the UK. The Service is also active in the enhancement and promotion of digital scholarship in the UK as well as internationally. After eleven years of service, the AHDS recently lost its funding from the JISC (Joint Information Services Committee) and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council). The Service will cease to exist in its present form in March of 2008.
The panel discussion was introduced by the head of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, Professor David Robey. The other members of the panel were Lorna Hughes, Manager of the AHRC ICT Methods Network, and Professor David Shepherd, Director of the Humanities Research Institute.
Professor Robey stated that the end of the AHDS may be decisive in the history of digital scholarship in the UK as this may be the end of national support. It is national support that has defined digital scholarship in the UK for many years and has helped the nation to become one of the world-leaders in the field. Without a national approach, the field may flounder or return to the dark days of scattered digital scholarship with little coherence or ambitions as a field.
At the present time, the AHDS preserves over one thousand projects in various digital forms, some of which include the Stormont Papers (the complete collection of the parliamentary debates of the Northern Irish Parliament under British rule), and Designing Shakespeare, (a multi-media database of the performances of Shakespeare over a forty year period). The collection of the AHDS is undoubtedly one of the most important digital collections in the world and some of it ‘born-digital’ collections exist in no other location.
The panel discussed some of the problems that may occur after the closure of the AHDS There is no indication as to what will happen to the collection after the closure, except that the responsibility for preservation of the individual project may be handed to institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories are responsible for collecting, preserving, and dissemination the intellectual output of universities in a digital form, there are some reservations, as express by David Shepherd, that institutional repositories are up to the task. Preservation requires projects to be prepared in a certain way and is an ongoing process. It also requires the ability to deal with complex data in various forms. There is also the serious problem that not all universities have institutional repositories, ironically including King’s College; London, the principal home of the AHDS. Although institutional repositories may one day be able to handle the tasks of the AHDS, there was great concern, as expressed by all members of the panel, that this was yet some time away. In the longer term institutional repositories may be able to look after complex data, but not now. David Robey also expressed the loss of the AHDS may also mean the end of its integrated catalogue to search the collections under its umbrella.
Lorna Hughes, the Manager of the AHRC Methods Network, stated that the decision to cease funding of the AHDS came at the same time that digital resources had reached a critical mass and access to this was altering the very nature of scholarship across the spectrum. To withdraw funding now may impact upon the ability to reuse this significant resource and to curate and present it in a user-friendly and innovative way in the future.
The program that Lorna Hughes is Manager, the highly inventive Methods Network, also ceases to be funded in 2008. The Methods Network is involved in numerous activities to promote the use of digital technologies in the humanities through workshops and other events. As the name indicates, the Methods Network is active in promoting digital scholarship through connecting individuals across various disciplines through such things as the computational methods that they employ in their work. For instance, scholars may come together through tools (like text mining) or through methods (like visualisation). It is this cross-fertilisation that is vital to the promotion of digital scholarship as a field, not only because of the economic efficiencies that it provides, but also because central to the concept of ‘innovation’ is the sharing of knowledge across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
Lorna Hughes also lamented that there was a serious dearth of tools available to scholars to properly exploit digital resources; perhaps another activity that could benefit from greater central coordination. One way that this could be achieved is through online resources such as the arts-humanities.net community platform being developed by the Methods Network. It is hoped that this community platform will continue part of the work of the Methods Network in a virtual form and carry on the conversation that will take digital humanities and its methods forward.
David Shepherd discussed what universities can do in this post-AHDS period. His own experience from running the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield; one of the UK’s premier centres within the Digital Humanities, is that institutional repositories are no where near close to being able to support complex data as made by HRI Sheffield. He made the case that universities now have additional responsibilities now that the AHDS is gone, but there is a gap between what they can do and what is needed. 50% of all projects funded by the AHRC in 2006 had some sort of digital output that indicated that we cannot now make a divide between the digital and the posing of research questions.
The demise of the AHDS is a challenging period and institutions need to move quickly to overcome any gaps in the services offered by the AHDS. If they don’t move quickly, there is a danger that some of the digital output of the humanities in the UK will be lost along with the skills needed to preserve and provide access to this data.
After the AHDS: The End of National Support?
Lorna Hughes has kindly agreed to answer some questions regarding the issues discussed during the panel.
The AHRC has stated that there is now a much higher IT experience and competence in the Arts and Humanities than ten years ago. Compared to the situation in 1998 when I started working on my first internet project for historians, this does indeed seem to be the case: Researchers and practitioners regularly use the internet for communication, research or publishing; information on the more complex applications of ICT methods is easier find; there are institutional repositories etc.
Why do you think that an organisation such as the AHDS would still be needed?
after the AHDS
While it is true that there is a greater level of IT competence in the arts and humanities than 11 years ago, there is still a paucity of support for specialist arts and humanities digitization and preservation initiatives, not to mention a lack of support for the use of ICT for advanced research. There are only a very small number of HEIs in the UK that have specialist units which provide ICT support and advice for the arts and humanities - the vast majority of academics have access to little more than basic technical and applications support from their computing services. Similarly, the development of institutional repositories is extremely patchy in UK HEIs.
Furthermore, the role that the AHDS has played is far greater than the provision of technical support. It was a data repository, a source of information about standards and digital preservation, and a trusted source of advice for those preparing technical appendices for AHRC grant applications.It developed an informal, yet crucial,advocacy role, which will be missed.
However, the decision has been made and I suspect that it will not be reversed. While there has been a good deal of unhappiness in the community about the decsions (with over 1000 people signing an online petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AHDSfunding/), the questions that were raised in the DRHA panel focussed on the questions of where we go from here: how can the community take forward the digital preservation and sustainability agenda, how can communities of practice be supported, and how can we work together to develop the common agenda?
One thing emphasized by David Shepherd in the panel was the need tot demonstrate the evidence of value of ICT in the arts and humanities. Only by demonstrating clearly that this sort of work is changing the way in which arts and humanities researchers are working, and having a demonstrable effect on research outcomes, will this work be valued by funders. The Methods Network has been developing some case studies which we hope will illustrate this. Simliarly, there is a need to think about how we can take forward the community agenda. www.arts-humanities.net certainly has a role to play in this respect (or at least it will until funding for the MN ends in 2008!)...
Working together
I think you are right in stressing that it is now up to the community to work together and find ways of replacing at least some of the many services the AHDS provided. As the AHRC have stated that they want to directly work with HEIs to enable them to do what the AHDS is currently doing, should that not be an incentive for HEIs to get together and develop an agenda? After all, it is hard to imagine that the AHRC could individually work with even a fraction of all HEIs existing in the UK...
And even if this were to happen, where would that leave smaller arts organisations or independent researchers and artists?
podcast - David Robey
David Robey asked me to point you to this JISC Podcast, in which he outlines his views on the issues arts & humanities researchers’ face in the digital world, initiatives they should be aware of and the importance of e-Science. Although the podcast is not specifically about what might happen after the AHDS, David sets these issues in a wider context and deals with some of the problems he also discussed at DRHA.
Q&A with David Shepherd
David Shepherd has kindly agreed to answer some questions:
During the panel, you stressed that HEIs in the UK are not yet ready to preserve and sustain their own digital outputs. As digital preservation does need expertise and long term planning, it seems to me that HEIs would need to create permanent positions for digital curators. If you agree with that, do you think that smaller HEIs would ever be able to afford that?
This is a challenge for large HEIs as well as small. As you know, JISC is funding a project to explore how inter-institutional collaboration might work (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres...). This kind of collaboration has to be the way forward — not only economies of scale, but also standards demand it.
Would you say that the majority of HEIs are aware of the complexity of the problem of digital preservation?
I’m sure the answer to this has to be no. This is no reproach to the majority of HEIs, of course; it’s in the nature of the problem (or let’s call it the challenge…).
What advice would you give to those who are creating digital resources and are worried about sustainability? How is the Humanities Research Institute dealing with this situation?
My advice would be to talk (as researchers do increasingly anyway) to people with track record and expertise in the area: even if they don’t have a ready-made solution (and the AHDS did not provide, or pretend to be able to provide, such a solution), they know what the issues are. The HRI is experienced in sustaining resources well beyond the lifetime of the projects that created them; but of course it has always relied heavily on the AHDS for preservation of underlying data, and is still working out the fine detail of how to deal with the withdrawal of this valuable standards-driven function. The way forward has to be collaboration, which is not only a repetition of my earlier answer, but also an anticipation of my next one.
Do you think it would be useful if HEIs were to start something like an informal group to discuss these issues and also to engage with the AHRC (who have stated that they want to directly work with HEIs)?
Yes. Discussions (led by AHDS) about collaboration to ensure sustainability were under way before the AHRC took its decision to withdraw funding, and these will continue. And the AHRC, as I said during the panel, prides itself on being a listening research council. I think it is aware that its decision has not absolved it of a problem, but necessitated new ways of dealing with it in partnership with the HE sector. It has also recently changed its mode of general engagement with HEIs from individual to collective (on a regional basis), so engagement on the specific issue of ICT that is also collective can only be welcomed by the AHRC.
In Germany and some other continental countries it is mostly libraries that deal with digital preservation. Do you think that the larger libraries in the UK (especially the copyright libraries) should play a more visible role in this and maybe become something like a national digital repository (and advisory) service in the way the AHDS is today?
I’m sure there is scope for this to happen, and indeed the British Library is working towards developing this sort of function: the issue of digital preservation was a major driver of the BL’s recent rethinking of its content (no longer collection!) strategy (see http://www.bl.uk/contentstrategy and http://www.bl.uk/about/collectioncare/digpresintro.html). But it would be unfair to expect the BL and other copyright libraries to take on the very specific mission that the AHDS had, especially in relation to advisory functions, but also in relation to preservation of specialist resources created with research-council funding. I suspect it is the HE sector that is going to have to pick up the baton/burden, which takes us back to the question of institutional repositories. Of course with fEC becoming more established, it should be possible to present to the research councils in general, and AHRC in particular, cogently argued cases for support beyond the lifetime of projects. It is important to make the arguments, and make them in intellectual, research-driven terms: as I said during the panel, that’s the only language they understand!
David - thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions!
British Library: much 'of the UK's digital output will be lost'
While we are discussing digital preservation 'after the AHDS', other parts of the UK's digital memory seem to be at threat too. The British Library may face drastic funding cuts that would affect its role as part of the national memory:
In an article in The Observer, the chief executive of the world-renowned institution today urges the government to protect the centuries-old resource - 'the mind and memory of the nation'. In a strongly worded public plea to make the preservation of standards at the library a priority in the expected round of spending cuts, Lynne Brindley warns that Britain will soon be left without a resource that it has come to take for granted.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2175023,00.h...
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Torsten Reimer
http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk
Possibility of creating a synergy from Japan
A comment from the other side of the world.
"End of support?? Apprarently not! Our project has the same problem and we work hard to solve it. Maybe we can work together."
We are organising a petition-based international group called "ACT Archaeology" (27 participants from 9 nations). Its initial goal is to submit a proposal of the re-tun of the digital data survey for Japanese archaeology (JAD2 survey) that we conducted in 2006. However, this is also an international propaganda campaign for the promotion of the use of ICT in archaeology and cultural heritage.
Since "archaeological computing" is not an established academic subject in Japan (and in many countries), our survey can provide an excellent starting material for the promotion. The promotion of such discipline obviously includes financial support, as it has been done by AHDS in UK. Currently, our project is still a small private one, but it is published in one of the biggest national-level newspaper in Japan which is sold 3.8 million copies every day. Many academic presentations and publications have been made in Japan, Europe and UK during the last 2 years.
Maybe it is possible to collaborate each other in order to
create a synergy effect for the similar goals we have.
More details are available from
http://www.arts-humanities.net/397
Official website (English, Italian and Japanese)
http://chiron-training.org/go_sugimoto/digital_survey/index_...
Thank you for your attention.
If you are interested, please contact:
ACT Archaeology Logo
Vast-Lab, PIN, The University of Florence, Italy
GO SUGIMOTO
Re: Possibility of creating a synergy from Japan
Thank you for your comment! Working together to increase the visibility of the use of advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities is exactly what the Methods Network was created to do, albeit (primarily) on a national level. National level would also be the keyword for the current debate, as we are not so much concerned with raising funds for a single project (important as it may be), but rather concerned with funding for a national infrastructure for all arts and humanities disciplines. International support is helpful in this, but I guess that articulating the requirements and problems of the UK academic community is what the funding bodies here are (and have to be) mostly concerned with.
Having said that, I would be interested in continuing the dialogue with you about archaeology. We have two groups here that you may be interested in, Mapping the Past and Archaeology and 3D technology - both discuss (different) aspects of ICT in archaeology. Please feel free to contact me directly for further information or to discuss options such as setting up a discussion forum on archaeology on our site if you think that this may be helpful.
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Torsten Reimer
http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk