Tag: digital preservation

iPres 2016 – International Digital Preservation Conference Bern, Switzerland

I was extremely lucky to attend iPres 2016 the International Digital Preservation conference this year held in the beautiful Swiss capital city Bern.
Bern and a view of the Eiger, the Monch and the Jungfrau
Bern and a view of the Eiger, the Monch and the Jungfrau

The conference attracts some of the leading practitioners in the field so it’s a real privilege to be able to hear from and speak to people who are leading in research and development – creating tools, developing workflows and undertaking research into all aspects of digital management and preservation.

It will take a while to digest everything – there was so much to learn! – but I thought I would gather together some “highlights” of the session while still fresh in my mind.
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Welcome to the north!

I was delighted recently to welcome colleagues from across the UK to Lancaster University for an Archivematica UK User group meeting.  It was the hottest day of September here in Lancaster and while the campus did look lovely I did recommend our wonderful campus ice cream shop* to help cool down.

campus
Lancaster University campus (photograph Rachel MacGregor)

Archivematica UK User Group is an informal group made up of people considering, testing or using Archivematica, a digital preservation system.  Those who attended are at all different stages of development and have a wide range of collections that they manage.  What unites us all is a desire to tackle digital preservation as best they can with the resources they have available and to share experiences with others in the digital preservation community.

What Archivematica is: an open-source digital preservation system.

What Archivematica is not: a magic bullet that will solve all your digital preservation needs.

Continue reading Welcome to the north!

The long tail

Source: http://negativespace.co/photos/coding/ CC0
Source: http://negativespace.co/photos/coding/ (CC0)

 

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.

Continue reading The long tail