Comments on: Withdrawal of AHDS Funding http://www.stoa.org/archives/648 Serving news, projects, and links for digital classicists everywhere. Wed, 08 May 2013 16:09:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Charlotte Tupman http://www.stoa.org/archives/648/comment-page-1#comment-97326 Charlotte Tupman Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:16:26 +0000 http://www.stoa.org/?p=648#comment-97326 The Government has issued the following response to the AHDS petition:

Thank you for your e-petition.

Government policy is that decisions on such services are a matter for the Research Council concerned.

The Government expects that such decisions would only be taken after a careful review of the service in question. We are aware that the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) only took the decision to cease funding the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) after detailed consideration. The Council concluded at its March 2007 meeting that having regard both to the performance and cost of AHDS, this was not something they should continue to fund. There are no grounds for the Government seeking to ask the Council to reconsider that decision.

]]> By: Juan Garces http://www.stoa.org/archives/648/comment-page-1#comment-74076 Juan Garces Mon, 04 Jun 2007 09:23:11 +0000 http://www.stoa.org/?p=648#comment-74076 The withdrawal of funding for the AHDS is indeed a source of serious concern over the valuable services offered by it over the last decade. In terms of long-term preservation of digital project outputs, it should be said that this withdrawal discloses the achiles heel of an esteemed institution like the AHDS and one which is in tension with the qualification ‘long-term’: the data created by AHRC/B-funded (and other) projects should be preserved for the future, but such preservation can only be guaranteed by an institution that is _not_ funded over fixed periods of time. The kind of preservation and derivative services has to be carried by structures that are not dependent on changes in funding policies. While I certainly hope that the AHDS will find alternative sources of funding to make up for the AHRC withdrawal, I do hope that the more long-term structural needs are taken into consideration in order to assure a sustainable and robust approach to digital preservation.

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