The Repository Fringe modestly claims to be the “UK repository community’s unmissable gathering” and happened on 1 & 2 August 2016.
This was my third visit to the RepoFringe conference which is organised by the Digital Curation Centre, Edina and the University in Edinburgh. Why do I think it is a conference worth attending?
We have been doing some thinking around how to improve the research data management services we offer here at Lancaster. We’re keen to move away from the idea of the role of research data management as purely for compliance purposes – we want to really push the idea of open data and data reuse and develop the idea that the research data produced by the university are valuable assets. We know that researchers at the university are working on interesting, valuable and important work. Look at Derek Gatherer’s work on the Zika virus or Maggie Mort’s project looking at disaster planning and children and a host of other more specialized datasets supporting research right across the sciences and the humanities. Each dataset will have its own context, background and requirements for it to be properly interpreted and understood.