The New Media Monthly blog has featured a case study
on plans to make use of social geo-location sharing services at the forthcoming Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2010) which will be held at the University of Sheffield over 12-14 July. The blog also includes a longer feature article which asks “Is location-based social networking the next big thing?“. In this article Brian Kelly of UKOLN describes how events can provide an ideal opportunity to evaluate the potential of emerging new technologies such as location-based services.
Archive for the ‘Publications’ Category
Use of Social Geo-location Service at IWMW 2010 Highlighted by New Media Monthly
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010Open Science Report Invites Comments
Friday, June 11th, 2010The Open Science at Web-Scale Report by Dr Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre, was commissioned by JISC and published in November 2009 by UKOLN/Digital Curation Centre. This consultative document explores aspects of open data and open science and how institutions might respond to these developing trends. It is now available for comment on WriteToReply, and feedback from interested practitioners would be very welcome.
Follow Ariadne on Twitter
Friday, May 28th, 2010In addition to its RSS feed, Ariadne is now transmitting over Twitter where you will be able to find out about new articles and a range of other information snippets about Ariadne. See @ariadne_ukoln.
Open Science in the Data Decade
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010Dr Liz Lyon, UKOLN Director and Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre, University of Bath, explores some of the opportunities and challenges of a data-driven world in a short article Open Science in the data decade in the latest issue of Central Government magazine. She describes aspects of open data including consumer-sharing of personal genomic information and citizen science, and contrasts this with the relatively closed data from much publicly funded research. Harnessing the capacity of the crowd in curating data and incentivising contributions through new credit frameworks are referenced. The activities of the JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre in providing advocacy, good practice guidance and community training are highlighted, together with potential new data informatics roles for the 21st century. Liz is also author of the consultative report Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential.
Liz Lyon Interviewed for ABC Science Online
Monday, April 19th, 2010During her visit to Australia in November 2009, Liz Lyon was interviewed for her thoughts towards the article Putting the citizen into science by Suzannah Lyons which has recently been published by ABC Science Online . Asked about the increased involvement of ordinary people in scientific projects, Liz remarked, “Clearly in the last few years these sorts of opportunities have been greatly facilitated by social networks and the collaborative tools that we’ve seen with Web 2.0.” She pointed to the way in which citizen science is increasing public awareness of scientific work, “perhaps in some ways demystifying it.” While stressing the need to contribute reliable data in such a partnership, Liz concluded, “Citizen science is not only changing the way we do and perceive science, it’s also empowering people to make a difference.”
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.