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8th International Digital Curation Conference 2013: Dates and CfP

Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda
8th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) 2013
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13
14-16 January 2013
Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

IDCC brings together those who create and manage data and information, those who use it and those who research and teach about curation processes. Our view of ‘data’ is a broad one – video games and virtual worlds are of just as much interest as data from laboratory instruments or field observation. Whether the information originates in the arts, humanities, social or experimental sciences, the issues faced are cross-disciplinary. Digital curators maintain, preserve, and add value to digital information throughout its life, reducing threats to its long-term value, mitigating the risk of digital obsolescence, and enhancing the potential for reuse for all purposes. If you are a curator, if you teach or train future curators, or if you depend on them for your work, IDCC is for you.

This year the theme for the conference is:

Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda.

The theme recognises that in recent years there has been an explosion in the amount of data available, whether from tweets to blogs, data from sensors through to “citizen science”, government data, health and genome data as well as social survey data. Technology allows us to treat as ‘data’ content which would not once have merited the term – recordings of speech or song, video of dance and theatre performance, or even animal behaviour. Indeed, it now enables us to treat as quantitative what once could only be qualitative. There are challenges in finding data and making them findable, in the ability to use them effectively, to take and understand data, to process, analyse and extract value from data, to visualize data and then to communicate the stories behind them.

This process is now being termed data science. It is being used across sectors to describe a wide range of data activities in the commercial, government and academic sectors dealing with information whose primary purpose is not always research-related. Activities are not discipline-specific; in fact data science is being described in some quarters as a new discipline in itself.

Call for Papers

The IDCC11 Programme Committee invites submissions to the 8th International Digital Curation Conference that reflect our conference theme.

The conference will include research tracks, practice tracks and poster sessions as well as associated workshops. Research papers will be eligible for publication as peer-reviewed articles in the International Journal of Digital Curation. [http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/issue/current] Practice submissions for which full papers are received will be considered for publication as general articles in the IJDC. Poster submissions will receive dedicated viewing time during the event, as well as a plenary slot for an ‘elevator pitch’.
Once again, IDCC will be organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), UK in partnership with the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).

The call for papers and full submission details can be found at:
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/call-papers
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/submissions

New Ariadne Available

Ariadne Issue 68 has recently been made available on the World Wide Web and its readers will immediately notice it has a completely new look-and-feel, not only to the latest issue but the entire site. Its appearance represents the sum of several months' work on modernising the publication. It has been redesigned in order to make it more responsive to the needs of not just the busy practitioner but also readers with a mind to delve more deeply into the Magazin's content which dates back to the beginnings of digital library and resources development when it was first published alongside its print companion issue in January 1996.

Brian Kelly has written, 'I am pleased to announce developments to Ariadne which not only enhance the user interface but also, perhaps more importantly, provide much richer access to the large number of articles which have been published during its lifetime.

Ariadne was launched at a time when mailing lists provided the main communications channel with Web sites acting primarily for publishing information. In today's environment there is a much greater diversity of communications and publication channels including blogs, wikis, Twitter and social networks. Ariadne continues to have a valuable role to play in this space and we hope the developments which have been launched in this issue will appeal to both existing readers and those who may not have come across Ariadne previously. In light of the changing landscape we have reduced Ariadne's publication frequency from four to three times per year. We feel Ariadne provides a valuable publishing channel which is positioned between the many blogs which describe digital library developments and peer-reviewed journals. We hope you enjoy the new-look Ariadne and welcome your feedback.'

 

 

 

 

The development of the new platform for the publication has been driven by the thoughts and suggestions of respondents to surveys conducted prior to the onset of development and which we have worked hard to address. We are not by any means closed to further feedback and the Magazine carries a new system of contacting us in order to give your further thoughts and suggestions. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the many readers and authors of Ariadne for their time and contributions and look forward to future feedback.

This feature is not intended to go into great detail about the improvements the new site offers since the simplest thing is for readers to visit Ariadne themselves. Nonetheless, you will, we hope, appreciate that much has been undertaken to address the requirements identified prior to development. The considerable advancement made in screen resolutions has meant that we have adopted a narrower band of article text to make articles far more readable and provide at the same time considerably more complementary information about the articles in the right-hand column at article level.

The use of tags has meant that the publication now enjoys a radically higher degree of connectivity in all respects and offers readers a wide range of new data, of particular use to readers seeking information on particular themes or on authors' interest and expertise. Newcomers to information science benefit from an easier path to information about concepts and developments thanks to the corpus of keywords now offered by Ariadne while the inclusion of data analysis features also provide readers with the opportunity to test such concepts in terms of their recency and level of usage.

Whatever the platform and mode of delivery, the core of a publication like Ariadne is its body of content, now considerably more searchable and usable than before. A great deal of effort has been invested in ensuring that none was lost in the migration process and we would be very keen to hear from authors at any time, but in particular if something of theirs has failed to appear! We have gone to great lengths to make that content more readily summarised, whether through tags, tables of sub-headings and the analysis features mentioned above. While the perspective of publication's editor will ever remain forward-looking, seeking the material that will be of use and interest to readers as it emerges, there can be no denying, as some respondents have wisely pointed out, that Ariadne represents one of the few remaining long-term witnesses of developments from the mid-1990s to the present day. It is our contention that this migration to a Drupal-based platform has also provided readers many more tools with which to investigate that history should they so wish.

JISC Observatory Report Launched: Delivering Web to Mobile

The JISC Observatory team is pleased to announce the launch of a TechWatch report entitled Delivering Web to Mobile. As described in the introduction:

This report is intended to help staff of UK education institutions, involved in the development of content, gain an understanding of the emerging approaches to delivering services and content for mobile devices using the Web.

This report looks at the growth of mobile and the state of the Web while giving an overview of approaches to delivering content and services optimised for the mobile environment. This includes approaches to Web design for responsive sites, leveraging access to device functions and capabilities, as well as the use of Web technologies to build mobile applications. The following sections are included in the report: State of the Mobile Web (including UK HEI findings); Mobile Web Browsers; Responsive Web Design; Mobile First; Progressive Enhancement; Server-side Device Detection; Dedicated Mobile Sites; Mobile Web Apps; HTML5; Device APIs; HTML5 Frameworks and Hybrid Apps.

The report, which was written by Mark Power, JISC CETIS, is the latest output provided by the JISC Observatory, a JISC-funded initiative provided by the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN and CETIS. As described on the JISC Observatory Web site, the Observatory aims "to systematise the way in which the JISC anticipates and responds to projected future trends and scenarios in the context of the use of technology in Higher & Further Education in the UK".

Last year the JISC Observatory published a TechWatch report entitled Augmented Reality for Smartphones. Two further TechWatch reports, on ebooks and data-driven infrastructure issues are currently in preparation. Also note that a JISC Observatory workshop session on Identifying and Responding to Emerging Technologies will be given at UKOLN's Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2012, which takes place at the University of Edinburgh over 18-20 June.

Reminder: earlier news features are available from the News Feature Archive

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Some members of staff at UKOLN make use of blogs to support their dissemination and user engagement activities, either as part of UKOLN's core activities or to support project work.