Live Streaming at IDCC 09

If you are planning to follow the 5th International Digital Curation Conference online, you can now watch the main sessions broadcast from the event via a live video stream.

You can see the live stream at the new event NetVibes page at www.netvibes.com/idcc2009. NetVibes is a tool for collecting resources and feeds from all over the web, which we hope will enable you to get everything you need to stay up to date in one place, if you are participating in the event remotely.



[screen shot of IDCC 2009 NetVibes page]

You will find recordings of any sessions that you may have missed, updates from this blog and the official @idcclive Twitter commentary, and all the opinions and comments tagged with the #idcc09 hash tag - all brought together at one page.

The main plenary sessions, including the DCC symposium, will be live streamed on Thursday 3rd December and Friday 4th December, subject to consent from the individual speakers. Parallel sessions will not be covered.

If you cannot access NetVibes for any reason, then you can also view the live video stream by clicking here.

Workshops prior to the International Digital Curation Conference

Pre-conference workshops can be very useful and interesting; they can be a good part of the justification for attending a conference, giving an extended opportunity to focus on a single topic, followed by a broader (but shallower) look at many topics, at the conference itself. This time it is quite frustrating, as I would very much like to go to all the workshops! There is still time to register for your choice, and for the IDCC conference itself.

Disciplinary Dimensions of Digital Curation: New Perspectives on Research Data


Our SCARP Project case studies have explored data curation practice across a variety of clinical, life, social, humanities, physical and engineering research communities. This workshop is the final event in SCARP, and will present the reports and synthesis.

See the full programme [PDF]

Digital Curation 101 Lite Training


Research councils and funding bodies are increasingly requiring evidence of adequate and appropriate provisions for data management and curation in new grant funding applications. This one-day training workshop is aimed at researchers and those who support researchers and want to learn more about how to develop sound data management and curation plans.

See the full programme [PDF]

Citability of Research Data


Goal: Handling research datasets as unique, independent, citable research objects offers a wide variety of opportunities.

The goal of the new DataCite cooperation is to establish a not-for-profit agency that enables organisations to register research datasets and assign persistent identifiers to them.

Citable datasets are accessible and can be integrated into existing catalogues and infrastructures. A citable datasets furthermore rewards scientists for their extra-work in storage and quality control of data by granting scientific reputation through cite-counts. The workshop will examine the different methods for the enabling of citable datasets and discuss common best practices and challenges for the future.

▪ See the full programme [PDF]

Repository Preservation Infrastructure (REPRISE)
(co-organised by the OGF Repositories Group, OGF-Europe, D-Grid/WissGrid)


Following on from the successful Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop at IDCC 2008, this workshop discusses digital repositories and their specific requirements for/as preservation infrastructure, as well as their role within a preservation environment.

5th International Digital Curation Conference : Register Now!

Hear ye, hear ye! [Shameless promotion here, but with useful information embedded!]

Time to register for this premier curation event, coming up in London, in the first week in December. We have a great programme this year, with Douglas Kell, head of BBSRC as the opening Keynote, and Timo Hannay of Nature as the closing keynote. In between we have perspectives on scale from US viewpoints, particularly the two large NSF-funded Datanet projects, and from the UK with reports linked to neurosciences and social simulation.

In the first afternoon we have our popular Minute Madness, followed by the Community Space: part of the conference shaped by you, plus a symposium on citizen science.

The second day has a wide range of interesting papers. Do you want to know how curation is being tackled in some US universities? The implications of Chronopolis or CASPAR? What those Australians are doing in data curation? How to preserve software, or to do emulation a bit better? What metadata might be appropriate for scientific datasets, or how to extract metadata from resources better? What are the information requirements of Life Sciences, or the Arts and Humanities? How to curate a database that’s constantly changing? Then come to Kensington in December!

Nearly forgot to mention the pre-conference workshops, some of which deserve blog posts of their own.

New issue of IJDC

The latest issue (volume 4, issue 2) of the International Journal of Digital Curation is now available. It's a bumper issue, with two letters to the editor (a whiff of controversy there!), 8 peer-reviewed papers (originating from last year's International Digital Curation Conference), and 6 general articles (two of which came from last year's iPres08 conference). I'm really pleased with this issue, which as always is extremely interesting.

This is the last issue to be produced by Richard Waller as Managing Editor, and I'd like to pay tribute to his dedication in making IJDC what it is today. He has sourced most of the general articles himself, and those who have worked with him as authors will know the courteous detail with which he has edited their work. They may not know the sheer blood, sweat and tears that have been involved, nor the extraordinarily long hours that Richard has put in to make IJDC what it is, alongside his "day job" of editing Ariadne. Thank you so much, Richard.

We will have a new Production Editor for the next issue, whom I will introduce when that comes out (we hope at about the same time as this year's International Digital Curation Conference in London... have you registered yet?). We have some interesting plans to develop IJDC in volume 5, next year.

Update: I thought I should have said a bit more about the contents, so the following is abridged from the Editorial.

Two papers are linked by their association with data on the environment. Baker and Yarmey develop their viewpoint with environmental data as background, but their emphasis is more on arrangements for data stewardship. Jacobs and Worley report on experiences in NCAR in managing its “small” Research Data Archive (only around 250 TB!).

Halbert also looks at elements of sustainability, in distributed approaches that are cooperatively maintained by small cultural memory organizations. Naumann, Keitel and Lang report on work developing and establishing a well-thought out preservation repository dedicated to a state archive. Sefton, Barnes, Ward and Downing address metadata, plus embedded semantics; their viewpoint is that of document author. Gerber and Hunter similarly address metadata and semantics, this time from the viewpoint of compound document objects

Finally, we have two papers loosely linked through standards, though from different points on the spectrum of the general to the particular, as it were. At the particular end, Todd describes XAM, a standard API for storing fixed content; while from the more general end, Higgins provides an overview of continuing efforts to develop standards frameworks.

Moving on to general articles, in this case I would like to mention first my colleagues Pryor and Donnelly, who present a white (or possibly green?) paper on developing curation skills in the community.

Next, I would highlight two very interesting articles that originated from iPres 2008. These are Dappert and Farquahar who look at how explicitly modelling organisational goals can held define the preservation agenda. Woods and Brown describe how they have created a prototype virtual collection of 100 or so of the thousands of CD-ROMs published from many sources, including the US Government Printing Office. Shah presents the second part of his interesting independently-submitted work on preserving ephemeral digital videos. Finally, Knight reports from a Planets workshop on its preservation approach, while Guy, Ball and Day report from a UK web archiving workshop.

IJDC Volume 4(1) was published

That's volume 4, issue 1 of the International Journal of Digital Curation... and I didn't report it here. My apologies for that. It's our biggest issue yet, with 10 peer-reviewed papers and 4 general articles, plus 2 editorials (a guest editorial from Malcolm Atkinson, and a normal one from me). There's some really interesting stuff, mostly from the Digital Curation Conference in Edinburgh last year.

There are still a few papers from last year's conference to come, plus a selection from iPres 2008 at the BL in London as well. We are also hoping that some papers will emerge from iPres 09, which has just opened registration, and will shortly be feeding back the results of their selection process to authors. Still time to submit to this year's Digital Curation Conference, guys (submissions close August 7, 2009).

We have done a couple of interesting analyses on the IJDC. One was a "readership analysis" based on web stats, for the period January-June 2009. Eight out of the ten most down-loaded papers in that time were from IJDC 3(2) (the ninth was from 3(1), and the tenth was from IJDC 1). These 10 papers were down-loaded just under 440 times each during that period (395 to 485 times).

The second was to use Google Scholar to assess citations for the issues up to and including 3(2). Issue 4(1) is too recent. I checked the peer-reviewed papers, which GS suggested had been cited 92 times (maximum 11 times for that most-down-loaded Beagrie article from Issue 1), for an average of 3.3 citations per paper. I also checked the articles, although I ignored simple reports, editorials and reviews. Counting peer-reviewed papers and checked general articles, there were 142 citations, for an average of 2.7 citations per item.

Only one out of those eight most down-loaded papers in issue 3(2) had translated those downloads into significant citations, the Cheung paper has 6. But we should give them time, I think; citations per checked item per issue are noticeably lower for more recent items, as you might expect.

• 4.2 in IJDC 1
• 3.3 in IJDC 2(1)
• 4.2 in IJDC 2(2)
• 2.1 in IJDC 3(1)
• 1.4 in IJDC 3(2)

By the way, we are particularly proud of one citation of an IJDC paper from a paper in Nature's Big Data Issue (Howe et al, The future of biocuration). The citation was of the Palmer et al paper in IJDC 2(2)... but Google Scholar failed to notice it. So these figures come with a few caveats!

Digital Curation Conference deadline extended

5th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC09)
Moving to Multi-Scale Science: Managing Complexity and Diversity.
2 – 4 December 2009, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London, UK.
**************************************************************************
We are pleased to announce that the Paper Submission date for IDCC09 has been extended by 2 weeks to Friday 7 August 2009: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/call-for-papers/
Remember that submissions should be in the form of a full or short paper, or a one page abstract for a poster, workshop or demonstration.
Presenting at the conference offers you the chance to:-

• Share good practice, skills and knowledge transfer
• Influence and inform future digital curation policy & practice
• Test out curation resources and toolkits
• Explore collaborative possibilities and partnerships
• Engage educators and trainers with regard to developing digital curation skills for the future

Speakers at the conference will include:-

• Timo Hannay – Publishing Director, Nature.com
• Professor Douglas Kell – Chief Executive of the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
• Dr. Ed Seidel, Director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure

All papers accepted for the conference will be published in the International Journal of Digital Curation

Sent on behalf of the Programme Committee –

co-chaired by Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information.