Murray-Rust on Digital Curation Conference day 1

Peter Murray-Rust has blogged on our conference in Washington DC:

Overall impressions - optimistic spirit with some speakers being very adventurous about what we can and should do.

He paid particular attention to the national perspective from Australia:

"…Rhys Francis (Australia) . One of the most engaging presentations. Why support ICT? It will change the world. Systems can make decisions, electronic supply chains. humans cannot keep pace. We do not need people to process information.

Who owns the data, and the copyright = physics says, who cares? If it’s good, copy it. Else discard it. Storage is free. [PMR: let’s try this in chemistry…]

What to do about data is a harder question than how to build experiements

FOUR components to infrastructure. I’ve seen this from OZ before… data, compute, interoperation, access. Must do all 4. -

And he also highlighted the importance of domain knowledge in preference to institutional repositories (I go along with that).

And I thought this was interesting, relating to Tim Hubbard's presentation:

"particular snippet: Rfam (RNA family) is now in Wikipedia as primary resource with some enhancement by community annotation. So we are seeing Wikipedia as the first choice of deposition for areas of scholarship."

So it looks like things are going well!