James Currall

Digital identity matters

Digital objects or entities present us with particular problems of an acute nature. The most acute of these are the issues surrounding what constitutes identity within the digital world and between digital entities. These are problems that are important in many contexts but, when dealing with digital texts, documents, and certification, an understanding of them becomes vital legally, philosophically, and historically. Legally, the central issues are those of authorship, authenticity, and ownership; philosophically, we must be concerned with the sorts of logical relations that hold between objects and in determining the ontological nature of the object; and historically, our concern centers around our interest in chronology and the recording of progress, adaptation, change, and provenance. Our purpose is to emphasize why questions of digital identity matter and how we might address and respond to some of them. We will begin by examining the lines along which we draw a distinction between the digital and the physical context and how, by importing notions of transitivity and symmetry from the domain of mathematical logic, we might attempt to provide at least interim resolutions of these questions.

Raising information security awareness in the academic setting

This paper examines three approaches to increasing awareness in an academic setting: a discussion session, a checklist and a web based tutorial. All three are found to be effective in raising motivation and understanding of security because they present the issues in an accessible, interesting way. The research for the paper was funded by the JISC Committee for Awareness, Liaison and Training as part of a project on the human and organisational issues associated with network security. http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/calt/

We are archivists, but are we OK?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that the digital environment of the early twenty‐first century is forcing the information sciences to revisit practices and precepts built around paper and physical objects over centuries. The training of archivists, records managers, librarians and museum curators has had to accommodate this new reality. Often the response has been to superimpose a digital overlay on existing curricula. A few have taken a radical approach by scrutinising the fundamentals of the professions and the ontologies of the materials they handle.Design/methodology/approach – The article explores a wide range of the issues exposed by this critique through critical analysis of ideas and published literature.Findings – The authors challenge archive and records management educators to align their curricula with contemporary need and to recognise that partnership with other professionals, particularly in the area of technology, is essential.Practical implications – The present generation ...

Regression methods for high dimensional multicollinear data

To compare their performance on high dimensional data, several regression methods are applied to data sets in which the number of exploratory variables greatly exceeds the sample sizes. The methods are stepwise regression, principal components regression, two forms of latent root regression, partial least squares, and a new method developed here. The data are four sample sets for which near infrared reflectance spectra have been determined and the regression methods use the spectra to estimate the concentration of various chemical constituents, the latter having been determined by standard chemical analysis. Thirty-two regression equations are estimated using each method and their performances are evaluated using validation data sets. Although it is the most widely used, stepwise regression was decidedly poorer than the other methods considered. Differences between the latter were small with partial least squares performing slightly better than other methods under all criteria examined, albeit not by a statistically significant amount.

The world is all grown digital.... How shall a man persuade management what to do in such times

Understanding and communicating the cost and value of digital curation activities has now been recognised by a number of projects and initiatives as a very important factor in ensuring the long-term survival of digital assets. A number of projects have developed costing models for digital preservation but there remains a major problem with information assets (digital or otherwise) in that their value is difficult to express in terms that are readily understood by all the stakeholders, especially those who might fund their preservation. This paper introduces a range of issues concerning information value and business models for sustained funding of digital preservation, with particular reference to the espida Project recently completed at the University of Glasgow. This project has developed a model of information value that builds on the Balanced Scorecard approach to business performance developed by Kaplan and Norton. This model casts information curation as an investment where current and ongoing expenditure is incurred in order to produce future returns, benefitting a range of stakeholders. In this formulation, value is seen as multi-facetted and, from the point of view of the individual or organisation funding the curation, explicitly related to the funder’s strategic goals. It also recognises that benefits may only accrue over the long term and that there is a risk that information that is preserved may fail to deliver any return. Examples discussed in the paper concern the establishment of an institutional repository and the establishment of an e-thesis service for an educational institution. It concludes that a deconstruction of benefits of this kind can be more quickly and fully understood even by stakeholders not necessarily expert in the curation field. This facilitates the production of a well-constructed case that clearly articulates information value and the benefit that accrues from its curation, which in turn allows senior management or other funders to make funding decisions based on understandable information: the basic premise of good practice in management. This is a commonly understood idea and one that the espida methodology helps fulfil.

Investing in value: a perspective on digital preservation

Recently we have seen a number of reports from the British Library in the UK and from the State library services in both Florida and South Carolina in the US which have started to develop ideas around measuring how much their work is worth to the communities that they serve and thus to their paymasters. These cases highlight an interesting issue: how difficult it is to value that which is not tangible? Rather than focusing on a justification for funding, this paper will look at the issue of valuing intangibles within the context of digital preservation.

Digitisation: taking stock

The technicalities of digitisation are now fairly well understood, but what is less well understood is the range of issues that need to be considered before committing to a digitisation programme, if it is not to meet the fate of the BBC Doomsday Project. This article discusses a range of these issues in order to place digitisation firmly in a business and political context, including: why digitise, what to digitise, the audience for and packaging and discovery of digitised material, and finally the sustainability of the whole enterprise.

Statistics: more than pictures

This, the third of our series of articles on statistics in veterinary medicine, moves onto the more complex concepts of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. As these two areas are widely discussed in many clinical research publications, an awareness of the underlying methodology behind their use is essential to appreciate the information they convey.

Statistics: dealing with categorical data

This, the fifth of our series of articles on statistics in veterinary medicine, moves onto modelling categorical data, in particular assessing associations between variables. Some of the questions we shall consider are widely discussed in many clinical research publications, and we will use the ideas of hypothesis tests and confidence intervals to answer those questions.

Statistics: making sense of what we see

Dealing with numerical results from a research study can be a daunting task for the non-statistician. This article highlights some of the ways in which such data can be expressed to facilitate subsequent analysis.