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Powerpoint points: access, preservation and identity

Lorcan 2 min read

People have different styles with powerpoint presentations. Mine tend to be developed close to presentation and to be somewhat elliptical: points to keep me on course. Others are more carefully plotted narratives. Nevertheless, I find that quickly looking through a conference or workshop program of presentations can give quite a useful overview of current activity as well as a sense of what is on people’s minds. Here are some I have looked at recently – from Canada and Europe.
The Serials Ecosystem: Perspectives on the Transition from Print to Electronic Journals. Presented by University of New Brunswick Libraries. This provides an impressive line-up of library and vendor presentations. What comes across from the collection as a whole is the difficulty of managing digital resources in an environment of fragmented services and solutions. The program systematically covers various of the players in this space (publishers, serials vendors, library system vendors, ‘local loading initiatives’, consortia, libraries, and researchers). I found Gwendolyn Ebbet’s presentation of OCUL‘s Sholars’ Portal initiative of special interest as I had not been familiar with this coordinated approach before.
Which leads into Ontario Scholars Portal: Taking stock, moving forward which provides powerpoints from speakers considering various aspects of this initiative. The focus is on the suite of applications being developed across the OCUL membership to support better access to scholarly materials, and on their evaluation and assisted take-up. These include systems for resource sharing, reference management, resolution. We see a distributed resource sharing approach alongside the local intrastructural integration summarized in the following quote from the presentation by Mita Sen-Roy. She is talking about the use of RefWorks and SFX:

The two services build towards a richer linking environment in which information, once stateless, can be easily stored, shared, authenticated against, without a loss of its structure or metadata, between services such as a library database, non-scholarly website, material from course management software, a scholarly institutional repository, personal citation management software, or weblog. [ppt]

If much of the focus of the above is on access, Erpanet is an EU funded initiative which promotes awareness and good practice in digital preservation. Its website reports papers, workshops, and other material. A typical pattern is to post a workshop program with associated presentations, as with their event on workflow for digital preservation for example.
Again, Erpanet can assemble very relevant program participants, which was the case with their workshop on identifiers held in Ireland earlier this year. The site includes presentations, a workshop report and background materials. Presentations included a couple from my colleague Stu Weibel (on PURL and Info-URI), and authoritative overview of DOI, handles, ARK, the use of URNs by several European national bibliographic agencies, and OpenURL. There is a very useful keynote by Norman Paskin of the IDF.

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