UKOLN News

UKOLN has a vacancy for a Research Officer to work in the areas of Enhanced Tagging and Terminology Registries.

Emma Tonkin, Interoperability Focus Officer at UKOLN, gave a presentation on the Dublin Core Registry Community at the recent Metadata Open Forum in New York. Emma provided an overview of current work taking place within and around the community with particular reference to metadata vocabulary management. Her presentation is now available.

The RSP recently held its inaugural Summer School for prospective and new managers of institutional and subject repositories at Dartington Hall, Devon. The school made a very sound start to its work, delivering a comprehensive overview of the practical challenges and solutions to effective repository implementation and establishing a close-knit community that will continue to receive support from the RSP over the forthcoming year. Plans for subsequent schools are already in the pipeline and will be announced in due course. An at-the-event report on the School will be published in the summer issue of Ariadne Web Magazine.

The Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 has invited IWMW 2007 participants to submit lightweight examples of innovative uses of Web technologies which may be of interest to participants at this annual UKOLN event. Although the closing date for entries was officially Monday 9 July, the deadline has been extended until Thursday 12 July and the competition opened up so that non-attendees can also submit entries. The winner will be announced at the close of the IWMW 2007, on Wednesday 18 July 2007.

A paper entitled “Openness in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Standards, Open Access”, co-authored by Brian Kelly of UKOLN, Randy Metcalfe of the JISC OSS Watch Service and Scott Wilson of CETIS, was presented by Scott to the recent ELPUB 2007 Conference in Vienna.

Brian Kelly will facilitate a workshop session on “Managing New Technologies: The Challenge of Web 2.0″ at the Umbrella 2007 Conference to be held at the University of Hatfield over 28 – 30 July 2007. The workshop will take place on Thursday 28 June 2007 at 15.30.

Brian Kelly will give a talk on “The Accessible Web” at the Web Adept: Museums and the Web 2007 Conference which will be held at the University of Leicester on 22 June 2007.

A new report “Dealing with Data” charts a practical path through the challenges presented by the enormous increase in research data and will help all stakeholders plan the next steps in data curation. The report, by Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN and Associate Director, DCC, is strategically positioned to provide a bridge between the high-level Research Information Network Framework of Principles and Guidelines for the stewardship of research data, and that of practitioner-focused technical development work.

A consortium of international digital preservation projects, to which the Digital Curation Centre has contributed a great deal, is one of five short-listed nominees for the Digital Preservation Award, sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition as part of the 2007 Conservation Awards. Digital Repository Audit and Certification, undertaken by CRL, RLG-OCLC, NARA, DCC, DPE and nestor and comprising the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) Criteria and Checklist (maintained by the US Center for Research Libraries), the nestor project”s Criteria Catalogue and the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) published by the Digital Curation Centre and DigitalPreservationEurope, presents complementary methods for the self-assessment, audit and certification of digital repository infrastructures.

The Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) Staff Development Group has invited Brian Kelly to be the opening plenary speaker on this topic at its symposium for central and distributed IT support staff to be held at St Anne”s College, Oxford over 21-22 June 2007.