School of Creative Technologies (CT)

I am Communications and Publicity Officer for CiTech, which involves me in dissemination activities and liaison with other research centres in the University as well as further afield.

I lead the Future Proof Computing Group (formerly the Humanities Computing Group), one of the research clusters in CiTech, together with Dr David Anderson.  I am an associate member of CCCR due to my interest in digital preservation for memory organisations, and of CEISR. I am an active member of the Open Planets Foundation. My research interests include: metadata modelling for digital preservation; data warehousing applied to cultural domains; and the crossover between the history of computing and digital preservation.

Current Funded Research Projects

The KEEP Project – Keeping Emulation Environments Portable EU Grant Agreement ICT 231954 [£4m]^{[Back to top]}

Funded by EU Seventh Framework Programme.

Dr David Anderson (Principal Investigator) and I lead the Portsmouth KEEP team which includes Dr Dan Pinchbeck, Dr Leo Konstantelos, Dr Milena Dobreva and Dr Antonio Ciuffreda. KEEP is a European consortium which is developing emulation techniques for preserving digital objects: text, sound, and image files; multimedia documents, websites, databases, videogames etc. The overall aim of the project is to facilitate long-term, universal access to our cultural heritage by developing flexible tools for accessing and storing a wide range of digital objects.

We are addressing the problems of transferring digital objects stored on outdated computer media such as floppy discs onto current storage devices. This involves the specification of file formats and the production of transfer tools exploited within a framework, and takes into account possible legal and technical issues.

Although primarily aimed at those involved in Cultural Heritage, such as memory institutions and games museums, the Emulation Services we develop also serve the needs of a wide range of organisations and individuals because of their universal approach based on porting emulators on a Virtual Machine. In this way we are creating the foundation for the next generation of permanent access strategies based on emulation.

The particular focus of the Portsmouth KEEP team within the wider effort is the investigation of metadata models to describe the technical environment needed for emulation; creating GUIs for both the Emulation Framework, and the Virtual Machine peripheral device manager; developing a transfer tool framework; and dissemination to the Computer Science community.

POCOS (Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia) [£130k]^{[Back to top]}

Coordinators: David Anderson and Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth)

Funded by JISC

Over recent years significant progress has been made in understanding the issues involved in preserving complex materials and environments. European projects such as Planets and KEEP have provided tools and techniques which have moved forward the state of the art. The POCOS project will deliver a series of 3 symposia at locations across the United Kingdom at which global thought-leaders in research into the Preservation of Complex Objects will share and thereby extend the body of knowledge on this topic. Each seminar will be supported by a substantial and innovative dissemination programme to ensure that the maximum long-term value is obtained from the outputs of the seminar. This will include the production of a peer-reviewed book of the outputs from each symposium offered to the community in a variety of low-cost (or free) formats including print-on-demand, PDF/A and free Kindle e-book. It is also proposed to webcast and/or web-release parts of each symposium in order to increase access for the community. POCOS will deliver pathfinder conclusions to the JISC community which will contribute to shaping the future direction of research in this area.

Project Partners: University of Portsmouth, British Library, King's College London, HATII (Univ. Glasgow), Joguin sas.

Digital Preservation Console Project (Development Study) [£13k]^{[Back to top]}

Coordinators: David Anderson and Janet Delve (University of Portsmouth)

Funded by JISC

This small project seeks to investigate the extent to which it might be possible to develop an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to enable non‐specialist information professionals to undertake a variety of preservation and information management tasks with a minimum of preservation‐specific theoretical knowledge. This ‘Digital Preservation Console’, should offer considerable opportunity for capacity‐building across institutions to manage, preserve and strategically discard digital material.

Selected Publications

Earlier publications [CDPA]        Publications since 2007 [IR]

Professional Memberships^{[Back to top]}

Member, AHRC Peer Review College

Member, Editorial Board, International Journal of Society Systems Science.

Member (via University of Portsmouth / JISC), Open Planets Foundation

Reviewer, Annals of the History of Computing, Historia Mathematica, Global Business and Economics Review.

Member, Committee of the Association for History and Computing