UKOLN News

State of the Art of Web Archiving

lisrw — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:12:45 +0000

The 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.

Tools of Our Trade (2010)

lisrw — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:49:11 +0000

Slides are now available for Ann Chapman’s recent talk entitled Tools of Our Trade on Resource Description and Access (RDA) to library and information science students at London Metropolitan University. Ann provides some background to her presentation and a link to the slides themselves in her latest posting to the blog Culturage Heritage.

Curation of research data in the disciplines of Engineering

lisrw — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:08:25 +0000

The 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.

Sage Commons Congress: Foundation for a New Public Domain Resource

lisrw — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:22:42 +0000

Sage 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

lisrw — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:44:58 +0000

With 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.”

Research Data Management Forum: Booking Soon to Close

lisrw — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:38:23 +0000

Only a few days now remain to book a place at the fourth meeting of the Research Data Management Forum (RDMF4). This Forum’s theme will be Dealing with Sensitive Data: Managing Ethics, Security and Trust. It will take place over 10 – 11 March 2010 at Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre, University of Manchester. The Forum is designed for researchers, digital repository managers, staff from library, information and research organisations, data curators, data centre managers, data scientists, research funding organisations and research networks. Further information is available from the Digital Curation Centre Web site.

British Library Warns UK’s Web Heritage ‘could be lost’

lisrw — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:28:54 +0000

Many 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.”

Web 2.0 and the Social Web

lisrw — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:19:37 +0000

Only a few places remain for the one-day workshop entitled An Introduction to Web 2.0 and the Social Web to be held in Nottingham on Wednesday 17 March 2010. This workshop is designed for members of the museums, libraries and archives communities. It will seek to demystify the terminology and the technologies as well as address the challenges which institutions may face in seeking to make use of Web 2.0 to support the needs of their users. The workshop will be facilitated by Marieke Guy of UKOLN. Details of the Nottingham event and how to book the last few places are available.

The Panton Principles for Open Data in Science

lisrw — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:26:18 +0000

The 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.

Issue 62 of Ariadne Now Available

lissk — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:45:40 +0000

Issue 62 of Ariadne is now available with its usual mix of main articles, event reports and reviews on a wide range of topics. LMS users may be interested to read of the implementation of Xerxes at Royal Holloway while researchers have notice of activity JISC is planning to carry out on Research 3.0. There are also articles, among others, on Web preservation and reference management, an information model of digital identifiers, a user-driven methodology for the iterative development, testing and implementation of Dublin Core Application Profiles in diverse repository software environments, the current situation in ebook readers, some recent developments in democratising the archive, the value of intranets as a strategic asset and a tool designed to display information about researchers and their activities.