Chris Rusbridge is the Director of the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh. About the DCC:
Scientists, researchers and scholars across the UK generate increasingly vast amounts of digital data, with further investment in digitisation and purchase of digital content and information. The scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from lack of the basics of good practice, such as adequate documentation for the data.
Working with other practitioners, the Digital Curation Centre will support UK institutions who store, manage and preserve these data to help ensure their enhancement and their continuing long-term use. The purpose of our centre is to provide a national focus for research and development into curation issues and to promote expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format. [About the Digital Curation Centre]
Chris came through OCLC recently, and gave a thoughtful presentation which nicely framed some of the issues that data curation poses: “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow:” the players on the curation stage [ppt: 6.2MB/63 slides].
Some of these issues also come up in the report on the recent ARL/NSF meeting on data stewardship:
Washington, DC—In late September, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted a workshop funded by NSF to explore new approaches—including the roles of research libraries in partnership with other organizations and entities—to the stewardship of scientific and engineering digital data. The final report of the workshop, To Stand the Test of Time: Long-Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering (Washington, DC: ARL, 2006), is now available on the ARL Web site at https://www.arl.org/info/frn/other/ottoc.html. [ARL Announces…]
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