The 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.
Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
BRTF: Making the Business Case for Digital Preservation
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010State 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.
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.”
The Panton Principles for Open Data in Science
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010The Open Knowledge Foundation has made an announcement concerning the launch of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science. The Foundation states that open data should be data that are “freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers…” and that accordingly data relating to published science should be available in the public domain. The Principles themselves hold that the legal status of scientific datasets should be explicit and that content licences are not appropriate for data. The first draft of the Panton Principles was written in July 2009 by Peter Murray-Rust, Cameron Neylon, Rufus Pollock and John Wilbanks and were refined with the assistance of the members of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Science.
CILIP Executive Briefing on RDA
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Ann Chapman of UKOLN will be speaking on the development of RDA at the CILIP Executive Briefing on Resource Description and Access to be held on 23 March 2010 at CILIP HQ in London. The Briefing will be of interest to senior managers, cataloguing managers, cataloguers and the supplier community.
RDMF: Opening Bio-Health Data and Models Securely and Effectively
Monday, February 8th, 2010The Welcome and Introduction to the fourth meeting of the Research Data Management Forum (RDMF) to be held over 10 – 11 March 2010 at the University of Manchester will be provided by Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Associate Director, DCC, and Stéphane Goldstein, Head of Programmes, RIN. They will welcome the opening keynote speaker Professor Iain Buchan, Professor of Public Health Informatics and Director of the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics (NIBHI), University of Manchester. Professor Buchan’s keynote address is entitled Opening Bio-Health Data and Models Securely and Effectively for Public Benefit. Further information is available.
6th International Digital Curation Conference: 6 – 8 December 2010
Thursday, January 21st, 2010The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has announced the dates for the 6th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC10) as Monday 6 – Wednesday 8 December 2010. The theme of the Conference this year will be Participation & Practice: growing the Curation Community through the data decade. Our venue will be Chicago, USA, where the Conference is being presented jointly with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in partnership with the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). The Call for Papers will be released in March and registration will open in September 2010.