The 8th International Digital Curation Conference 2013 (IDCC13) with the theme ‘Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda’ will take place on 14-16 January 2013 at the Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The call for papers is currently open and the IDCC11 Programme Committee that reflect the conference theme. The theme recognises that in recent years there has been an explosion in the amount of data available, whether from tweets to blogs, data from sensors through to “citizen science”, government data, health and genome data and social survey data. Technology allows us to treat as ‘data’ content which would not once have merited the term – recordings of speech or song, video of dance or theatre or animal behaviour – and to treat as quantitative what once could only be qualitative. There are challenges in finding data and making it findable, in the ability to use it effectively, to take and understand data, to process, to analyse and extract value from data , to visualize data and then to communicate the stories behind it.

This process is now being termed data science. It is being used across sectors to describe a wide range of data activities in the commercial, government and academic sectors dealing with information whose primary purpose is often not research-related. Activities are not discipline-specific; in fact data science is being described in some quarters as a new discipline.

The Call for Papers including a list of topics can be found at:- www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/call-papers.

It looks like an online magazine has lost 12 years of Web content. The magazine, 3:AM, stored it’s content on online servers which went down last week. Andrew Gallix, editor-in-chief, told the Independent newspaper that the events of the past week have been “traumatic” and highlighted the “the fragility of online content”.

Martin Bryant, managing editor of technology blog The Next Web, said: “There are risks with storing everything on outside servers. We’ve been lucky that there have been no massive outage yet. We’re still waiting for the first cloud disaster. Fingers crossed it never happens, but must be prepared.”