Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

August 2005 Volume 3 (4)

Curation

Saving for the nation

Stewardship of digital assets should be the responsibility of everyone reading this journal. The recently launched Digital Curation Centre, Scottish-based but with a UK remit of research, advice and support, was established to help cope with the challenges. Chris Rusbridge and Andrew McHugh introduce the centre’s aims.

“Digital curation” [1] is the active management of data over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest and is the key to reproducibility and reuse. Even before digital content is conceived, and after it has fulfilled its primary usefulness, digital curation activities must be undertaken and promoted if digital materials are to remain viable.

Curation is not a box to be ticked or a single process through which data passes. It is an ubiquitous endeavour that should characterise all interactions with and manipulations of digital content. Curation embraces and goes beyond that of enhanced present day reuse, and of archival responsibility, to embrace stewardship that adds value through the provision of context and linkage: placing emphasis on publishing data in ways that ease reuse and promoting accountability and integration.

The foundation of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) reflects the belief that long-term stewardship of digital assets is the responsibility of everyone in the digital information value chain. The long-term value of data rests in their potential as evidence, their reuse possibilities, and their role in facilitating compliance and in ameliorating risk. As scholarly research and scientific study become increasingly driven by the analysis of data, long-term access to these data is crucial in enabling the verification of scientific discovery and providing a data platform for future research.

Only by promoting the ideas that underpin digital curation from the conception and curation of our digital assets until long after they have passed out of their primary usefulness can we claim to have succeeded. The Digital Curation Centre, through its organisation and practical activities, reflects these ideals through innovative research, development, service delivery and outreach.

The primary aims of the centre are:
- to promote an understanding of the need for digital curation among the communities of scientists and scholars;
- to provide services to facilitate digital curation;
- to share knowledge of digital curation among the many disciplines for which it is essential;
- to develop technology in support of digital curation; and
- to conduct long-term research into all aspects of digital curation

Led by the University of Edinburgh, the DCC consortium includes the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils. Given the breadth and the pervasiveness of the digital curation challenge, the core partners recognise that a sustainable contribution can only be made by means of widespread activity. To ensure that this happens a network of associates has been established.

Activities have been separated into four key task areas, with an umbrella management group overseeing and coordinating the work of each. The four main areas are Research, Development, Services and Outreach. Our activities therefore range from solid research into innovative and service-led development work and a lucid outreach programme.

Research. There are various challenges to be met within the research agenda, each topic likely to generate highly visible outputs. Each will provide results that can be exploited within development activities and ultimately transformed into services. Current focuses include data integration techniques in the context of digital preservation metadata; effective data annotation techniques to facilitate subsequent searching, viewing and tracking across time, applications, researchers and migrations; appraisal for digital archiving; provenance and data quality; automatic extraction of semantic metadata; and legal issues.

Development. Current development effort is being directed mainly towards the creation of a representation information registry and repository, in order to document the structure and semantics of the ways in which digital data are stored, providing a method for accessing the content of digital objects. Representation information is not necessarily the original or official software access method or format specification, but can take the form of anything that allows the information content of a digital object to be interpreted. Tools are being developed to reside atop the registry and repository infrastructure to facilitate its population, update and use.

Services and Outreach. Services and outreach activities are regarded as vital if the DCC is to have maximum impact. Current activities are wide-ranging and directed at the very heart of community concerns and expectations. The DCC Advisory Service maintains a world class help-desk facility, which offers a first point of contact for enquiries on a range of digital curation topics. The Advisory Service contributes to an ongoing series of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).

The DCC also publishes a range of resources to assist institutions, data centres and repositories with their digital curation efforts. At the forefront is the Digital Curation Manual, including chapters contributed by international experts, with an editorial board consisting of leading researchers and practitioners in the field. For many topics, a less in-depth insight is offered by a series of DCC briefing papers, designed to meet the needs of senior managers, offering quick and high level overviews of the topics that are explored in more detail in the Curation Manual.

Additional DCC services include the development of audit and certification standards, in collaboration with the Research Libraries Group; the development of a repository of tools for digital curation; a preservation technology and standards watch; frequent case studies; and a series of regional and institutional site visits, which offer a useful opportunity to present details of the DCC’s activities. These visits also allow the Centre to get a better idea of community expectations.

A further key service is the provision of a series of workshops and training events to reflect existing knowledge and practices, and to enable the community to work together to build new understanding in other areas. Forthcoming workshops including the subjects of Persistent Identifiers, Digital Repositories, and Costing Models for Digital Curation.

Outreach activities are at the forefront of the DCC’s interactions with its stakeholder communities. Key activities include user requirements gathering exercises; a “virtual point of presence” Web portal; a high-quality peer reviewed International Journal of Digital Curation; and an Associates Network. The latter aims to make the DCC partnership more pervasive; it welcomes and brings together prominent members from UK data creating and managing organisations, leading data curators overseas, supranational standards agencies, and representatives of UK industry and commerce involved in digital curation.

The viability of the DCC depends upon it gathering the right level of expertise, making that expertise available to the widest community, and demonstrating long-term commitment to the provision of research, development, services, and outreach.

Encompassing insight, expertise and an acute awareness of the essential role of effective curation in all our digital activities, the DCC aims to be a standard bearer for best practice in an area that is relevant to every individual, institution and organisation that relies upon and uses digital information.

References
1 This article is adapted from ‘The Digital Curation Centre: a vision for digital curation’ by Chris Rusbridge, Peter Burnhill, Seamus Ross, Peter Buneman, David Giaretta, Liz Lyon and Malcolm Atkinson, presented at ‘From Local to Global: Data Interoperability – Challenges and Technologies’, Mass Storage and Systems Technology Committee of the IEEE Computer Society, 20-24 June 2005, Sardinia, Italy.

Chris Rusbridge, Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh

Andrew McHugh, Digital Curation Centre & Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow

Information Scotland Vol. 3 (4) August 2005

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Last updated:11 October 2005