5 comments on the Statement of Principles on Data Management

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (“the Agencies”)  recently released a Draft Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management that is worth reading. It is good to see movement on this in Canada, and […]

The Snowden Archive launches

START SEARCHING The official launch of the Snowden Archive, “Snowden Live: Canada and the Security State,” featuring a Q&A with Edward Snowden, takes place on Wednesday, March 4, at Ryerson University in Toronto. The event is sold out, but will be live streamed on cbcnews.ca. More event details at cjfe.org/asksnowden About the Snowden Archive The Snowden […]

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Stephen Abrams: Curation Semiotics – Foundational Theory and Practice

Stephen Abrams speaks in the DCI lecture series in March 2015.

The lecture takes place at 16:00-17:30 on Thursday, March 19, in room 728 (7th floor) at the iSchool, Bissell Building, 140 St. George Street.

NOTE: We will broadcast the event on youtube: See the corresponding event page !

Curation Semiotics: Foundational Theory and Practice

Digital curation is a complex of actors, policies, practices, and technologies that enables meaningful consumer engagement with content of interest across space and time.  The UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) supports a growing roster of innovative curation services for use by scholars across the 10 campus University of California system.  However, recent initiatives in the area of research data curation have led to a significant change in UC3’s target audience.  While UC3 continues to support its traditional campus stakeholders – librarians, archivists, and curators – it is now also engaging directly with faculty, researchers, and students.

In response, UC3 has embarked on a comprehensive review of its systems and services to ensure that it is meeting its goals most effectively.  In doing so, however, a number of seemingly simple, yet deceptively difficult to answer questions cropped up almost immediately.  What constitutes the full spectrum of scholarly activities for which curation support may be usefully offered?  What does “preservation” mean for the new genre of research objects (or indeed, for “traditional” content)?  While curation practitioners can draw upon a number of useful frameworks for specific areas of concern, for example, the Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Trusted Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC), Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS), etc., it is not clear how, or indeed whether, their underlying conceptual models cohere into a comprehensive and unified view of the curation domain.  For example, many of the concepts at the heart of these standards, perhaps most problematically, “digital object”, remain woefully overloaded and under-formalized.

UC3 has developed a new model of the curation domain to provide a comprehensive, self-consistent conceptual foundation for the planning and evaluation of its activities (https://wiki.ucop.edu/display/Curation/Foundations).  While drawing from many prior digital library efforts, it also incorporates relevant concepts from other disciplines.  Most notably, the model considers digital content in terms of five semiotic dimensions of semantics, syntactics, empirics, pragmatics, and dynamics.  This presentation will examine UC3’s role as a curation services provider within a digital age research university and the use of its domain model in decision-making processes regarding its programmatic mission, services, and initiatives.

 

Stephen Abrams

Stephen Abrams

Biography

Stephen Abrams is the associate director of the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL), with responsibility for strategic planning, innovation, and technical oversight of UC3’s services, systems, and collections, including initiatives for repositories, web archiving, data management planning, and data curation.  He has participated in a leadership, governing, and advisory capacity for many digital library projects and organizations, including DataONE, Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, International Internet Preservation Consortium, ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A), Jewish Women’s Archive, JHOVE/JHOVE2, PLANETS, and the Unified Digital Format Registry, and on conference program committees for the iPRES, IS&T Archiving, and Open Repositories conferences.  His most recent work focuses on economic cost modeling for long-term sustainability of digital library services and curation domain modeling.  Prior to joining the CDL in 2008, Mr. Abrams was the digital library program manager at the Harvard University Library.  He holds a BA in Mathematics from Boston University and an ALM in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University.

Snowden Live: Canada and the Security State

https://cjfe.org/take_action/events/snowden-live-canada-and-security-state Date: Wednesday, March 4 2015 Time: 12-2 p.m. Where: RCC 103, Rogers Communications Centre, Ryerson University, 80 Gould Street, Toronto Join CJFE for a discussion about the state of mass surveillance in Canada, featuring a live Q&A with Edward Snowden. Whistleblower, former NSA contractor, and subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour,” Edward Snowden has sparked […]

Jon Ippolito: Digital Preservation and the Search for Renewable Culture

As part of the Digital Curation Institute’s Lecture Series 2015, on February 23 guest speaker Prof. Jon Ippolito is speaking about Digital Preservation and the Search for Renewable Culture. Abstract: Dead links, delaminated CDs, and demagnetized hard drives are all signs of a cultural heritage system in peril from technological obsolescence. Yet even if we […]

Workshop on ICT for Sustainability at the iConference 2015

Workshop page: http://iconf2015ict4s.120cell.org/ This workshop aims at establishing a community and potential research collaborations within the iSchools network and beyond to link efforts around ICT for sustainability. ICT can be a threat but also an enabler for environmental and social sustainability, in the form of systems that support the protection of natural resources, that foster communities […]

The 2015 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship: an interesting read

For those interested in digital curation and digital stewardship, the following will be an interesting read: The 2015 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship outlines “emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and key areas for funding, research and development to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible and comprehensible in the future, supporting a […]

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Margaret Hedstrom: CyberInfrastructure for Digital Curation – Some Lessons from SEAD

The DCI lecture on October 30 features Prof. Margaret Hedstrom

Abstract: Countless examples of standards, tools, and shared practices for digital curation exist, but do these puzzle pieces add up to a scalable infrastructure for Big Data?  SEAD (Sustainable Environment: Actionable Data) is building a suite of services for end-to-end capture, sharing, analysis, publishing and preservation of data for researchers in sustainability science.  Margaret Hedstrom, SEAD PI, will discuss SEAD’s efforts to align the needs and interests of diverse scientists with an evolving infrastructure for data preservation and access in the “long tail” of scientific research.

hedstrom_margaretMargaret Hedstrom is a Professor at the School of Information, University of Michigan. Her current research interests include digital preservation strategies, sharing and reuse of scientific data, and the role of archives in shaping collective memory.  She is PI for SEAD (Sustainable Environment: Actionable Data), an $8 million project funded by the US National Science Foundation, that is building cyberinfrastructure and developing new practices for data sharing, preservation, access and reuse. She also heads a NSF-sponsored traineeship (IGERT) at the University of Michigan called “Open Data” in partnership with faculty and doctoral students in bioinformatics, computer science, information science, materials science, and chemical engineering that is investigating tools and policies for data sharing and data management.  She currently chairs a study committee for the National Research Council, National Academy of Science, on Digital Curation Workforce and Education Issues.

The lecture took place on October 30 at 4pm at the Faculty of Information, in Room 728 (7th floor) at the iSchool, Bissell Building, 140 St. George Street.

Impressions

Margaret Hedstrom describes SEAD's focus on the long-tail in scientific research.

Margaret Hedstrom describes SEAD’s focus on the long-tail in scientific research.

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