Author: alex.ball

IDCC15 Demo Sessions: Digital repositories with Islandora

Fedora (the repository software, not the Linux distribution, or the hat) is highly regarded for being stable, reliable and flexible but it is essentially back-end software. System developers are expected to put their own front-end on it before the end …

IDCC15 Demo Sessions: Do you know the MANTRA?

The University of Edinburgh’s Research Data MANTRA course was first developed in 2010–11 as part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme. Commendably, development of the course did not end with the conclusion of the project. Indeed, Se…

Birds of a Feather session at IDCC15: Forging our digital future together

One of the aims of the 2015 International Digital Curation Conference was to take a look at how digital curation has matured over the past decade. A notable sign of this increasing maturity is the move away from each organization developing its own bes…

Metadata mapping for the pilot UK Research Data Registry

Back in October 2013, we told you about a project we are involved in to set up a pilot UK Research Data Registry. In short, we are piloting a service which would allow researchers to search for data across multiple UK data centres and institutional dat…

Preserving CAD

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are a type of file no archivist really wants to deal with. Not only do they tend to be large, complex and split across several files, they also tend to be poorly supported by any version of any system other than the o…

Access to Citation Data

Back in 2012, Jisc commissioned a study of the costs, benefits and risks associated with collecting and analysing citation data. That study is now nearing completion and will be published very soon. As a precursor to that, on 14 May 2013 I and a group …