Preservation

A week has passed since IASSIST 2009. I hope most of you have made it safely back home by now - and are ready to refresh the memories by watching the conference webcasts and viewing presentations. Webcasts of all three plenaries and Thursday and Friday's concurrent sessions in the Small Auditorium are now available. We didn't have cameras available during the Wednesday sessions, so no videos of these presentations, sorry! more...

The IASSIST Quarterly IQ Vol. 31 issue 3&4 is now available on the web:

http://iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iqvol31.html

This issue will only be available on the web. There will be no printed version mailed out to the membership.

The IASSIST Quarterly IQ Vol. 31 issue 3&4 is now available on the web:

  more...

In 2006, motivated by the OECD Open Access guidelines, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) carried out an online survey targeting professors of human sciences, social sciences and behavioural sciences in Finnish universities. Professors were asked, for example, whether their department had any guidelines on the preservation of digital research data. A great and alarming majority (90%) said no. The survey also charted what actually happens to research data and what are the barriers to and benefits of open access to research data. more...

Research Data Strategy Working Group Established http ://cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/media/press/rds_group_e.html, press release, August 12, 2008.

The research process generates huge amounts of data that are an important part of Canada's scholarly record and hold enormous potential as an additional discovery and problem-solving tool for
researchers. Unfortunately, Canada has no nationally adopted standards or policies governing how this data is collected, catalogued, or preserved. more...

Like everyone else, I've managed to catch up after being out of the office.  But IASSIST was worth every minute!  It was a pretty jampacked week, so I'm just getting around to blogging a few observations. more...

Anyone who archives his or her data also would like them to be found, recognized and still usable in the future. That is not a matter of course with electronic data. After all, hardware and software are changing all the time. Making data future-proof can be accomplished by ensuring that data sets and metadata meet certain guidelines. In consultation with large data producers and managers, DANS laid down what those guidelines need to be in its 'Datakeurmerk', which will continue to be developed further. more...

Luis Martinez-Uribe, Digital Repositories Research Co-ordinator, is based at the Oxford e-Research Centre and will be conducting a scoping study to capture researcher's needs for repository services to manage, curate, preserve and disseminate research data generated in Oxford.

A new blog (http://oxdrrc.blogspot.com/) has been set-up to record the progress of the project while disseminating outputs and information about relevant activities. more...

Announcing new deliverables from the DISC-UK DataShare project: more...

Technology of Data: Collection, Communication, Access and Preservation more...

The May 21 issue of Boing Boing describes the InfoBunker, a "Cold War era government command bunker converted into a data center". I realize that they're not referring to the same kind of data center we mean, but it was kind of fun to read about a data center that has "a self-sufficient power systems (six days' worth of diesel fuel; 17,000 gallons of water (for drinking and fire suppression); military-grade NBC air filtration). more...