UK: A brave digital future

Higher education institutions have a tremendous wealth of research knowledge and in this digital age how should this be preserved? Several sessions at the eighth annual conference organised by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee addressed this theme. Around 750 academics, consultants and ICT experts gathered in central London last week to learn more about keeping pace with the latest innovations and exchange ideas.

The broader scene was set by Martin Bean, Vice-chancellor of the Open University, in a keynote speech. Before taking up his post last October, Bean was general manager in the education products group at Microsoft in Washington. Born in Australia, he holds a bachelor's degree in adult education from the University of Technology in Sydney.

Calling himself a maverick and an anarchist, "not your normal vice-chancellor", he sketched out the challenges facing the sector: globalisation, massification and privatisation. There had been an exponential growth in numbers of students studying outside their own country, he said.

"Distance education is on fire - it is growing more rapidly than any other sector. Massification: we can't build enough bricks and mortar."

One in three students in higher education now studied in the private sector, Bean said. He predicted the private sector in the UK would play an increasing role over the next decade. Moreover, technology was changing the face of education.

"We need to find a balance of blending digital lifestyles and digital work styles. We have an unbelievable mismatch in teaching and learning."

Learning has to be integral to the workplace and higher education must remove artificial barriers to learning," he said.

Speaking at a session on research data: cost, benefits impact and planning was Neil Beagrie who conducted an investigation into keeping research safe. Beagrie said the biggest cost to institutions, apart from staff, in preserving research data was "stuff in and stuff out" not acquisition, preservation and planning.

Beagrie, a consultant in digital archive, library, science and research, said "ingest and access" was more expensive, contrary to the assumption that preserving digital information would be the most expensive.

His research found that storage, preservation and planning amounted to only 3.1% of costs compared with 21.5% for ingest and 16.9% for access.

Chris Rusbridge, former director of the Digital Curator Centre, found there was little coordination among institutions and funding from the UK Data Archive came in five-year grants. That made it difficult to plan for the longer term.

In a session on business models for sustaining digital resources, delegates heard of two examples from either side of the Channel: The National Archives based in Kew, Surrey, and INA, the national audiovisual institute in France.

Although both organisations receive government money, they have to generate income. Caroline Kimbell, head of licensing at Kew, said commercial income had increased from £4.2 million (US$6.5 million) in 2005 to £7.2m last year. This was largely based on the boom in family history.

She advised smaller archive collections to band together in consortia. They should be audience-led, 'unsiloed', technophile, experimental and opportunistic.

Meanwhile, across the English Channel, INA, the largest audiovisual centre in the world founded in 1974 as the legal deposit of all television and radio archives, will by 2015 make France the first country to have saved 100% of its audiovisual memory.

Roei Amit, INA's head of publishing, said the institute needed to raise a third of its budget from business. "So we have to have an entrepreneurial mindset."

Amit agreed with Kimbell that partnerships worked well. INA had its website embedded in editorial content of the Pompidou Centre and newspapers Figaro and Le Monde, for example.

The new generation of televisions will be able to connect to its website as well and the institute has also tapped into the Web 2.0 community. Income is also generated from small subscriptions from universities, schools and libraries, and from advertising. The INA online boutique sold CDs, videos and DVDs along the lines of Amazon.