By LHorton | February 17, 2015
The International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) is now ten years old. On the evidence of its most recent conference, is in rude health and growing fast.
IDCC is the first time IASSIST decided to formally support another organisational conference. I think it was a wise investment given the quality of plenaries, presentations, posters, and discussions.
DCC already has available a number of blogs covering the substance of sessions, including an excellent summary by IASSIST web editor, Robin Rice. Presentations and posters are already available, and video from plenary sessions will soon be online.
Instead I will use this opportunity to pick-up on hanging issues and suggestions for future conferences.
One was apportionment of responsibility. Ultimately, researchers are responsible for management of their data, but they can only do so if supporting infrastructure is in place to help them. So, who is responsible for providing that: funders or institutions? This theme emerged in the context of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council who will soon enforce expectations identifying the institution as responsible for supporting good Research Data Management.
Related to that was a discussion on the role of libraries in this decade. Are they relevant? Can they change to meet new challenges? Starting out as a researcher who became a data archivist and is now a librarian, I wouldn’t be here if libraries weren’t meeting these challenges. There’s a “hush” of IASSIST members also ready to take issue with the suggestions libraries aren’t relevant or not engaged with data, in fact they did so at our last conference.
Melissa Terras, (UCL) did a fantastic job presenting [PDF] work in the digital humanities that is innovative in not only preserving, but rescuing objects – and all done on small change research budgets. I hope a future IDCC finds space for a social sciences person to present on issues we face in preservation and reuse. Clifford Lynch (CNI) touched on the problems of data reuse and human subjects, which remained one of the few glancing references to a significant problem and one IASSIST members are addressing. Indeed, thanks must go to a former president of this association, Peter Burhill (Edinburgh) who mentioned IASSIST and how it relates to the IDCC audience on more than one occasion.
Finally, if you were stimulated by IDCC’s talk of data, reuse, and preservation then don’t forget our own conference in Minneapolis later this year.