Slides are now available
for Ann Chapman’s recent talk entitled The Why, What, How and When of RDA: the current state of play given to delegates from academic and public libraries at the CILIP Executive Briefing Day on Resource Description and Access (RDA) held in London on 23 March 2010 and repeated on 30 March 2010. The day focused on the need for RDA, the strategic aspects of moving to RDA and the challenges of implementation.
Archive for March, 2010
Summing up the UKOLN/MLA Web 2.0 Workshops
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010We have now completed the series of 13 workshops introducing the Museums Libraries and Archives community to Web 2.0 and the social Web. A blog post summing up the workshops is available on UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog.
State of the Art of Preservation and Curation in Institutional Repositories
Monday, March 29th, 2010The DCC has released a report by Alex Ball of UKOLN on the state of the art of preservation and curation in institutional repositories. Despite their initial focus on rapid access to research, repositories are increasingly seen to have a curatorial role for institutions’ digital assets. As a result, a range of tools has been developed to assist in everything from drawing up preservation plans and policies to extracting preservation metadata from files, alongside modular architectures for linking the tools together. The report, entitled Preservation and Curation in Institutional Repositories, presents the major advances in these areas and examines recent developments.
BRTF: Making the Business Case for Digital Preservation
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access (BRTF-SDPA), a new international initiative funded by JISC and other organisations, has recently released its report entitled Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information. Neil Grindley, programme manager at JISC, said, “This report takes a clear-headed and hard look at some of the ideas surrounding preservation ..” JISC is organising a free one-day symposium in London on 6 May 2010 where the Blue Ribbon task force will be presenting its final report alongside responses from the BBC, the Natural History Museum, the British Library, European Bioinformatics Institute and the European Commission. Further information is available.
State of the Art of Web Archiving
Thursday, March 18th, 2010The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has released a report on the state of the art of Web archiving by Alex Ball of UKOLN. Web archiving is important not only for future research but also for organisations’ records management processes; however, it is beset by technical, organisational, legal and social issues. The report indicates how these issues are being addressed in current research and development projects.
Curation of research data in the disciplines of Engineering
Thursday, March 4th, 2010The DCC SCARP Case Study Curation of research data in the disciplines of Engineering is now published. This seventh DCC SCARP Case Study highlights the barriers that exist to sharing Engineering data, and the impact these barriers have on the range of appropriate curation approaches. Sensitivity to these issues is key if Engineering data are to be fully exploited without jeopardising future research and development.
Sage Commons Congress: Foundation for a New Public Domain Resource
Thursday, March 4th, 2010Sage Bionetworks, a new, not-for-profit medical research organisation established in 2009 to revolutionise how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease, has recently announced that it is organising a Congress in San Francisco over 23-24 April, 2010. The Congress aims to establish the foundation for a new public domain resource, the Sage Commons. The organisation states, “Participation invitations have been extended to numerous experts and critical stakeholders. The Congress is already oversubscribed and details on Congress webcasts will be available shortly.” Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, will be leading the workstream on Citation of Network Models and Associated Data.
Digital Curation Centre Announces New Director
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010With the commencement this month of its third phase of evolution, the Digital Curation Centre has also announced the appointment of its new Director , Kevin Ashley, who will succeed Chris Rusbridge upon his retirement in April 2010. Kevin Ashley has been Head of Digital Archives at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) since 1997. His group has operated the National Digital Archive of Datasets for The National Archives of the UK for over twelve years. He is also a member of the JISC’s Infrastructure and Resources Committee, the Advisory Council for ERPANET and several advisory boards for data and archives projects and services. Liz Lyon, Associate Director, Digital Curation Centre, commented, “My colleagues and I at UKOLN look forward to working with Kevin as partners in the DCC as it takes up the third phase of its activity.”
British Library Warns UK’s Web Heritage ‘could be lost’
Monday, March 1st, 2010Many practitioners in digital preservation and access will have welcomed the recent news item from the BBC Technology News Web site on the UK’s Web heritage. They will be concerned that much of society as a whole remains unaware of the threat to the persistence of digital resources on which we increasingly rely. Commenting on this news item, Dr. Liz Lyon, Associate Director of the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and author of the report Dealing with Data, remarked, “We fully support the work that the British Library has undertaken to address the potential and irredeemable loss of so many Web sites. Moreover, professionals working in digital curation would wish to emphasise that the dangers are not confined to Web heritage. Our research data is in similar peril and assuring its sustainability is at the heart of the work being carried out by the DCC.”