Upstream, Downstream: embedding digital curation in workflows for data science, scholarship and society
The 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC17) will be held from 20-23 February 2017 at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd). The conference brings together digital curation professionals and educators with data producers and consumers to consider digital curation in a multi-disciplinary context.
There will be a programme of workshops on Monday 20 February and Thursday 23 February and the main conference will run from Tuesday 21 to Wednesday 22 February 2017.
Overview
Digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital content. While definitions of curation have changed little, its scope is becoming ever more pervasive. Data science is gaining prominence as a means to address grand challenges in research and society. Research and scholarship are becoming further mechanised. Public infrastructures for data storage, sharing and publishing gain further capability, while large scale mergers, takeovers and acquisitions have shaken up the research publishing sector. For policy makers, the question of how to ensure research data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) is tied to the question of how to ensure flexible and resilient infrastructures are openly available to support communities in that endeavour.
Despite their widespread applicability, digital curation skills, tools and services have a very mixed range of maturity and capability. Many organisations are only experimenting while in others they are embedded in organizational workflows. Research and cultural institutions and individual scientists and scholars have a much larger choice of technologies to help them manage research data and other digital objects of social or cultural value. Organisations face the challenge of orchestrating different on-site and off-site data services throughout the research lifecycle. How are organisations integrating cloud services for research data into their workflows? How are embedded research practices changing to deal with data management, preservation and publishing? What tools or models help organisations to deliver more agile services to support curation? The IDCC17 organizing committee is now inviting submissions addressing these questions, including but not limited to the topics suggested below.
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