UKOLN News

This new forum, created by the Digital Curation Centre in partnership with
the Research Information Network, will hold its first workshop in Manchester
on 19-20 March 2008. Themes to be explored are: the future shape of the
research data management community; and the provision of appropriate skills and effort for data curation. A briefing paper that explains the rationale of the forum is available. Intending delegates should e-mail the UKOLN Events Team (see “Related LINKS”) using the header “DATA FORUM”.

The Repository Support Project recently ran a one-day Professional Briefing at
Queen”s University Belfast in which Stephanie Taylor of UKOLN gave a presentation entitled “Copyright, IPR and the Institutional Repository”. Slides from this presentation are now available.

JISC has recently published a synthesis study of the 4-04 programme, Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions. Written by Maureen Pennock, DCC researcher at UKOLN, the study provides a comprehensive and categorised overview of the outputs from the entire programme. Categories include training, costs and business models, life cycles,
repositories, case studies, and assessment and surveys. Each category includes detailed information on project outputs and references a number of re-usable project-generated tools that range from software services to checklists and guidance.

The Research Information Network has recently announced the publication of
“Stewardship of digital research data: a framework of principles and guidelines”.
The framework is founded on the fundamental policy objective that ideas and knowledge, including data, derived from publicly funded research should be made available for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable.
The framework is based upon five broad principles which provide a guide to the development of policy and practice for a range of key players: universities, research institutions, libraries and other information providers, publishers, and research funders as well as
researchers themselves.

Brian Kelly will give a talk entitled “The UK Web Focus Blog” at a UCISA Innovation and Communication event which will be held at the Coventry TechnoCentre on 14 February 2008.

The Repository Support Project recently ran a one-day Professional Briefing at
Queen’s University Belfast in which Pete Cliff of UKOLN gave a presentation entitled “Making effective use of your repository”. Slides from this presentation are now available.

Dr Liz Lyon, UKOLN, University of Bath, and Dr Simon Coles, University of Southampton, gave a presentation at the first summit of the DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) Project held in Goettingen, Germany over 16-17 January 2008 with the theme “Towards a Confederation of Digital Repositories”. The presentation, entitled “eCrystals Federation: Open Repositories for global Open Science” is now available.

A further issue of the newsletter “Focus on UKOLN” has been published giving a series of information and opinion items on the work of the organisation written by its staff.