Tag: AIDA toolkit

From AIDA to CARDIO

AIDA had a part to play in the creation of another assessment toolkit, CARDIO. This project is owned and operated by HATII at the University of Glasgow, and Joy Davidson of the Digital Curation Centre was the architect behind the toolkit.om AIDA to CARDIO

CARDIO (Collaborative Assessment of Research Data Infrastructure and Objectives) is targeted at Research Data Management (RDM), and digital outputs associated with research – be they publications or data. The processes for the management of these digital assets has been a concern with HE Institutions in the UK for some time now. CARDIO will measure an Institution’s capacity and preparedness for doing RDM.

If you’ve been following our blog posts on this subject, you’ll recognise overlap here with AIDA. But where AIDA was assessing a potentially very wide range of digital asset types, CARDIO was far more focussed and specific. As such, there was a very real need in our project to understand the audience, the environment, and the context of research in higher education. It was targeted at three very specific users in this milieu: the Data Liaison Officer, the Data Originator, and the Service Provider. For more detail, see the CARDIO website.

I worked with Joy in 2011-2012 to contribute an AIDA-like framework to her new assessment tool. The finished product ended up as webforms, designed by developers at HATII, but ULCC supplied the underlying grid and the text of the assessments. The basic structure of three legs and numbered elements survived, but the subjects had to change, and the wording had to change. For instance, new elements we devised specific for this task included “Sharing of Research Data / Access to Research Data” and “Preservation and Continuity of Research Data”.

The actual reworking was done by ULCC with a team of volunteers, who received small payments from a project underspend. Fortunately these 12 volunteers were all experts in just the right fields – data management, academic research, digital preservation, copyright, and other appropriate subjects.
I could give you a long report of their insightful comments and helpful suggestions, which show how AIDA was reformed and reshaped into CARDIO. Some reviewers rethought the actual target of the assessment statements; others were strong on technical aspects. Some highlighted “jargon alerts”. Through this work, we improved the consistency of the meaning of the five stages across the three legs, and we added many details that are directly relevant to the HE community and to managing research data.

Benefits of CARDIO

Since its launch, CARDIO is now frequently used as a first step by UK Institutions who are embarking on a programme of managing research data. They use CARDIO to assess their institutional capability for RDM.

I’ll end with one very insightful paragraph from a reviewer which shows a detailed grasp of how an organisational assessment like AIDA and CARDIO can work:

“Processes, workflows, and policy grow more well-defined and rigid all the way up to stage 4, which represents a well-honed system suited to the internal needs of the repository. From that point onward, the progression to stage 5 is one of outward growth, with processes and workflows becoming more fluid to meet the needs of possible interoperating partners/collaborators. I generally do not see this “softening” in the 5 stages of CARDIO – rather, the 5th stage often represents things being fixed in place by legislation, a position that can become quite limiting if the repository’s (or stake holders’) needs change in the future.”

Reworking AIDA: Legal Compliance

Today we’re looking briefly at legal obligations concerning management of your digital content.
The original AIDA had only one section on this, and it covered Copyright and IPR. These issues were important in 2009 and are still important today, especially in the context of research data management when academics need to be assured that attribution, intellectual property, and copyright are all being protected.

Legal Compliance – widening the scope

For the new toolkit, in keeping with my plan for a wider scope, I wanted to address additional legal concerns. The best solution seemed to be to add a new component to assess them.

What we’re assessing under Legal Compliance:

  1. Awareness of responsibility for legal compliance.
  2. The operation of mechanisms for controlling access to digital content, such as by licenses, redaction, closure, and release (which may be timed).
  3. Processes of review of digital content holdings, for identifying legal and compliance issues.

Legal Compliance – Awareness

The first one is probably the most important of the three. If nobody in the organisation is even aware of their own responsibilities, this can’t be good. My view would be that any effective information manager – archivist, librarian, records manager – is probably handling digital content with potential legal concerns regarding its access, and has a duty of care. But a good organisation will share these responsibilities, and embeds awareness into every role.

Legal Compliance – Mechanisms & Procedures

Secondly, we’d assess whether the organisation has any means (policies, procedures, forms) for controlling access and closure; and thirdly, whether there’s a review process that can seek out any legal concerns in certain digital collections.

Legislation regimes vary across the world, of course, and this makes it challenging to devise a model that is internationally applicable. The new version of the model name-checks specific acts in UK legislation, such as the Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information. On the other hand, other countries have their own versions of similar legislation; and copyright laws are widespread, even when they differ on detail and interpretation.

The value of the toolkit, if indeed it proves to have any, is not that we’re measuring an organisation’s specific point-by-point compliance with a certain Statute; rather, we’re assessing the high-level awareness of legal compliance, and what the organisation does to meet it.

Interestingly, the high-level application of legal protection across an organisation is something which can appear somewhat undeveloped in other assessment tools.

The ISO 16363 code of practice refers to copyright implications, intellectual property and other legal restrictions on use only in the context of compiling good Content Information and Preservation Description Information.

The expectation is that “An Archive will honor all applicable legal restrictions. These issues occur when the OAIS acts as a custodian. An OAIS should understand the intellectual property rights concepts, such as copyrights and any other applicable laws prior to accepting copyrighted materials into the OAIS. It can establish guidelines for ingestion of information and rules for dissemination and duplication of the information when necessary. It is beyond the scope of this document to provide details of national and international copyright laws.”

Personally I’ve always been disappointed by the lack of engagement implied here. To be fair though, the Code does cite many strong examples of “Access Rights” metadata, when it describes instances of what exemplary “Preservation Description Information” should look like for Digital Library Collections.

The DPCMM maturity model likewise doesn’t see fit to assess legal compliance as a separate entity, and it is not singled out as one of its 15 elements. However, the concept of “ensuring long‐term access to digital content that has legal, regulatory, business, and cultural memory value” is embedded in the model.