repositories for the rest of us: DigCCurr Wrap Up

2007/04/23: DigCCurr Wrap Up

I've fixed the spelling and rendering issues in those blog entries which were raw dumps of the notes I took during the DigCCurr sessions. Apologies for their initial roughness -- when I said they were raw, I meant it. It didn't help that I was using Appleworks to draft the notes. Blogger did NOT like the text encoding Appleworks used and therefore rendered all diacritics in a very messy fashion.

I don't think I'll cover any more conferences in this manner. I don't think its useful for those who aren't there. The conference presentations will be put on the web at the DigCCurr web site at some point if one is interested in seeing the full content/context. I think it's far more useful to get some summary and analysis of the proceedings.

All in all I thought it was a fabulous conference.

The good?
*Reconnecting with colleagues, especially my former coworkers from SDSC and the UC. *Getting up-to-date with the European digital curation projects
*Hearing Liz Bishoff speak -- she is incredibly dynamic.
*Realizing that everybody is struggling to define the problem space of digital curation

The bad?
*The food at the Friday Center was both stale and in some cases rotten (wilted and rotting salad on both days). As a vegetarian the entree choices were limited to starch starch and more starch.
*Location - U.N.C. is gorgeous, but I mentioned feeling isolated in suburbia. Don't try to be a pedestrian near the Friday center unless you have a fair amount of courage.

My take-aways?
Nobody has a good definition of digital curation or digital preservation. Partnerships and people management are key to the success of any digital curation project. Librarians and archivists have to realize that we are not the only profession which has been radically transformed in the past 10 years. No single institution or profession can provide all of the necessary skills. In addition, no single institution can provide the economic sustainability needed to ensure longevity of digital objects. Digital curators need to pay more attention to developing business cases for archival repositories. Most projects are currently funded as projects and we need to move from soft-funding to production level services. In order to make the business case we should pay better attention to the demand side of the equation. What do the content providers need? For what community is the content being archived? Focusing on fulfilling those needs can assist in figuring out (a) what to do and (b) how much it's realistically going to cost.

I'm looking forward to reading the published papers from the conference. All in all, I'm glad I went.

Labels: DigCCurr 2007