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Internet Archive, Code for Science and Society, and California Digital Library to Partner on a Data Sharing and Preservation Pilot Project

In 2017, CDL joined Code for Science & Society (CSS) on the dat in the lab project. The Moore Foundation-funded project is currently piloting the use of the Dat Protocol in UC labs for data capture, data storage, and data sharing.

As our first year comes to a close, the project team has started looking to expand our pilot to see how Dat could be utilized in the field of preservation.  Below is an announcement cross-posted from the Internet Archive blog on June 6, 2018 that describes the next effort from our project team.

Research and cultural heritage institutions are facing increasing costs to provide long-term public access to historically valuable collections of scientific data, born-digital records, and other digital artifacts. With many institutions moving data to cloud services, data sharing and access costs have become more complex.

As leading institutions in decentralization and data preservation, the Internet Archive (IA), Code for Science & Society (CSS) and California Digital Library (CDL) will work together on a proof-of-concept pilot project to demonstrate how decentralized technology could bolster existing institutional infrastructure and provide new tools for efficient data management and preservation. Using the Dat Protocol (developed by CSS), this project aims to test the feasibility of a decentralized network as a new option for organizations to archive and monitor their digital assets.

Dat is already being used by diverse communities, including researchers, developers, and data managers. California Digital Library is building innovative tools for data publication and digital preservation. The Internet Archive is leading efforts to advance the decentralized web community. This joint project will explore the issues that emerge from collecting institutions adopting decentralized technology for storage and preservation activities.

The pilot will feature a defined corpus of open data from CDL’s data sharing service. The project aims to demonstrate how members of a cooperative, decentralized network can leverage shared services to ensure data preservation while reducing storage costs and increasing replication counts.

By working with the Dat Protocol, the pilot will maximize openness, interoperability, and community input. Linking institutions via cooperative, distributed data sharing networks has the potential to achieve efficiencies of scale not possible through centralized or commercial services. The partners intend to openly share the outcomes of this proof-of-concept work to inform further community efforts to build on this potential.

Want to learn more? Representatives of this project will be at FORCE 2018, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Open Repositories, DLF Forum, and the Decentralized Web Summit.

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More about CSS: Code for Science & Society is a nonprofit organization committed to building public interest technology and low-cost decentralized tools with the Dat Project to help people share and preserve versioned digital information. Read more about CSS’ Dat in the Lab project, our recent Community Call, and other activities. (Contact: Danielle Robinson)

More about IA: The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.” It works with hundreds of national and international partners providing web, data, and preservation services and maintains an online library comprising millions of freely-accessible books, films, audio, television broadcasts, software, and hundreds of billions of archived websites. https://archive.org/. (Contact: Jefferson Bailey)

For more information from CDL and UC3, contact uc3@ucop.edu, visit https://uc3.cdlib.org, or follow @UC3CDL

A portion of this blog was cross-posted from the Internet Archive blog on June 6, 2018

Job Opening: UC3 Product Manager (EZID) / Research Data Specialist

California Digital Library (CDL) has built a strong portfolio of innovative projects and initiatives concerned with promoting the use of persistent identifiers throughout the scholarly communication ecosystem.  Our work has ranged from experimentation and thought leadership to global PID service offerings.

As the home of the ARK standard and the N2T resolver, as well as institutional members of DataCite, Crossref, and ORCID, CDL is dedicated to innovating and sustaining the social and technical infrastructure that enables the open sharing and publication of all legitimate research outputs. This dedication has manifested in our work on data citations, DOIs for data, DOIs for publications, ARKs, ORCiDs, YAMZ, compact identifiers, organizational identifiers, data metrics, PID events, and more.

The centerpiece of these efforts is EZID, a service that makes persistent identifiers easy.  Since it started, EZID has grown into an internationally recognizable brand with partners around the globe, including representatives from academia, government, nonprofit and commercial sectors. Last August, the EZID program began to transition non-UC DOI services. This is done to focus our community’s time and resources back to DataCite and Crossref (as community infrastructure organizations) and free up resources within CDL for new PID projects.  We now are looking for ways to leverage this capacity and our expertise in the PID space.

Now Hiring

With the upcoming retirement of Joan Starr, we are looking for an experienced product manager to direct strategic planning, open source development, and community partnerships that will further enhance and extend CDL’s strategic leadership in scholarly PIDs.  This is an exciting opportunity to evaluate the potential for innovation, develop a compelling plan for how best to position CDL as an agent for positive change, and truly impact the PID landscape.

Next steps

If you are excited by this opportunity, we hope you will apply.  The position reports into the Director of the University of California Curation Center (UC3), CDL’s digital curation program. UC3 is also home to CDL’s systems and initiatives supporting digital preservation, data publishing, research data management, and data skills training for librarians.  Additional information on this position is available here: https://jobs.ucop.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=61143.