Nees, program officer in the Depart-
ment of Scientific Library Services and
Information Systems at the German
Research Foundation (DFG), the coun-
try’s largest funder of research. “The
big ‘A-ha!’ effect in Germany was that
somebody realized we are losing up
to 90% to 95% of the data produced in
public science over time because it is
not accessible anymore.”
Winkler-Nees’s observations are
echoed by others, including Rothen-
berg, Gary King, director of the Insti-
tute for Quantitative Social Science at
Harvard University, and Sylvia Spen-
gler, program director in the U.S. Na-
tional Science Foundation’s Computer
Science and Engineering directorate.
The biggest challenge facing data
preservationists, King says, is “the in-
frastructure to make it all happen. It’s
straightforward to get grants to do re-
search. The agencies that could pro-
vide the funding tend to provide short-
term funding—primarily for research,
sometimes to build infrastructure, but
virtually never for preservation. Preser-
vation is the promise of keeping things
in perpetuity. That’s a long time. Figur-
ing out that is really hard.”
“The kinds of domains which do
think about long-lived collections have
an inevitable tension between the ac-
quisition of the data and the preserva-
tion of the data,” Spengler says. “And
the funds for that, at least currently,
are all within one budget. So it has to
be an active decision within a commu-
nity how to deal with the preservation
issues for that community.”
However, these existing cultural
models are being challenged some-
what by more comprehensive national
initiatives. In Germany, the DFG re-
cently funded 28 projects with € 9. 9
million under the aegis of data acces-
sibility, including preservation; in the
U.S., the National Science Foundation
published requirements effective Janu-
ary 2011 that every funded project must
include a two-page data management
plan, including retention periods, on
a directorate-specific basis; and in the
U.K., JISC (originally the Joint Informa-
tion Services Committee) has long co-
ordinated data management and pres-
ervation policies among the nation’s
funders and research institutions.
Gaining momentum
Fitful as progress may be, the global
effort at addressing data preservation is gathering momentum. The
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is actively pursuing
a Digital Preservation Interoperabil-ity Framework specification; the JISC-sponsored Keeping Research Data Safe
report, published in two parts in 2008
and 2010 respectively, features numerous best practice recommendations;
Rothenberg and RAND Europe researcher Stijn Hoorens in 2010 co-authored a comprehensive report, which
was sponsored by the British Library,
that explored the library’s possible role
in preserving scientific, technical, and
medical data; and the White House Of-
Technology
Africa Increases Its Internet Usage
africa’s internet usage has
grown dramatically during
the last decade due to new
information and communication
technologies, including
improved fiber-optic networks
and increased availability of
computers and mobile phones.
africa had nearly 140
million internet users by the
end of 2011, compared to only
4. 5 million users at the end
of 2000, according to internet
World stats. The continent’s
internet penetration is 13.5%,
compared to 26.2% in asia,
35.6% in the middle east,
39.5% in Latin america and the
Caribbean, 61.3% in europe,
and 78.6% in north america.
The african nations with
most internet users are nigeria
( 45 million), egypt ( 21. 7 million),
morocco ( 15. 7 million), Kenya
( 10. 5 million), and south africa
( 6. 8 million). nigeria’s 29%
internet penetration is slightly
below the global average of 32.7%.
million), nigeria ( 4. 4 million),
morocco ( 4. 1 million), and Kenya
( 1. 3 million). africa’s Facebook
penetration is 3.6%, compared to
4.7% in asia, 8.4% in the middle
east, 25.5% in Latin america, 27.4%
in europe, and 50.3% in north
america. egypt’s 11.4% Facebook
penetration is almost equal to the
global average of 11.5%.
—Jack Rosenberger
