UKOLN News

This will be the theme of the CILIPS/SLAINTE conference on electronic information and libraries to be held in Dundee on 27 September 2006. Maureen Pennock of UKOLN will run a session entitled “From Digital Creation to Digital Curation” which will explore the challenges of managing digital cultural heritage resources in regional and local libraries to ensure preservation and accessibility.

In a joint initiative with the eBank UK and SPECTRa projects, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) will deliver a workshop covering current best practice in data curation including examples of a pro-active approach and drawing upon the experience of chemistry and crystallography to illustrate user

requirements, issues and barriers to implementation of curation methodologies. The workshop takes

place on 19 September 2006 at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Nottingham. The DCC will also host a stand where they will display posters and run a series of demos focusing on current curation research and development work.

Liz Lyon will be speak on “Adding Value to Data and Information” at the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium (RASAB) in Brussels on 15 September 2006. The event entitled “Developing Information Commons for Science in Europe” has been organised by CODATA, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology and Science Commons.

Liz Lyon, Associate Director of the DCC, will be speaking at a one-day seminar – chaired by Professor Chris McMahon of the University of Bath. This takes place at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London on 26 September 2006.

An international partnership has started work on a project to build a large-scale public infrastructure for research information across Europe. The “Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research” (DRIVER) project responds to the vision that any form of scientific-content resource, including scientific/technical reports, research articles, experimental or observational data, rich media and other digital objects should be freely accessible through simple Internet-based infrastructures. The project is a joint collaboration between ten international partners
with the intention to create a knowledge base of European research.

On 28 September 2006 Maureen Pennock and Michael Day will co-facilitate this workshop which will take place after the Ark Group conference on Driving the long-term preservation of electronic records.

Ann Chapman was invited to speak at the recent Seminar for New Archive Professionals given by the Society of Archvists at the University of Lancaster. Her presentation, entitled “First steps in metadata”, is now available online.

Brian Kelly gave a brief talk entitled “Web 2.0: The Potential of RSS and Location-Based Services” at a meeting on 4 September 2006 at the University of Edinburgh. Slides from this presentation are now available.

Ann Chapman of UKOLN, as Chair of the CILIP/BL Committee on AACR, will give an update on the current status of work on Resource Description and Access (RDA), the provisional title of the new edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, on 13 September 2006.

Maureen Pennock has written a further briefing paper entitled “EPrints Digital Repository Software” which has been added to the Technology Watch Papers section of the Digital Curation Centre Web site. This technology watch paper provides an introduction to the features and functionality of the EPrints digital repository system.