The Digital Curation Centre and the Representation Information Registry/Repository

1
The Digital Curation Centre and the
Representation Information Registry/Repository

• Maureen Pennock
• DCC, UKOLN
• CETIS MDR SIG, Bath, 28 June 2006

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Todays Talk

• The Digital Curation Centre
• DCC teams work areas
• Introduction to Representation Information
• Overview benefits of the DCC Representation
  Information Registry/ Repository (RIR)

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Digital Curation

• Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about
  maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of
  digital information for current and future use
• the active management and appraisal of data over
  the entire life-cycle

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• The Digital Curation Centre

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The DCC

• Launched in 2004
• Established to help solve the extensive
  challenges of digital preservation and curation,
  and to provide research, advice and support
  services to UK institutions
• Consortium project 4 partners
• 4 main teams distributed across the 4 UK
  locations

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Organisation to Engage Collaborate
communities of practice users
curation organisations eg DPC
community support outreach
service definition delivery
Collaborative Associates Network of
Data Organisations
management admin support
research collaborators
research
development co-ordination
testbeds tools
Industry
standards bodies
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DCC Outreach

• Raising Awareness and Dissemination
• Website (http//www.dcc.ac.uk )
• International Journal of Digital Curation
• Annual International Conference
• Understanding Users and their Needs
• Requirement Gathering
• Associates Network
• DCC Forum

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DCC Services

• Information Services
• Community-developed Digital Curation Manual
• Briefing Papers FAQs
• Technology Watch, Standards Watch, Legal Watch
• Case Studies
• Best Practice Checklists
• Advisory Services
• Events information days, workshops, training
• Helpdesk
• Audit and Certification Services

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DCC Research

• Annotation in Databases
• Data archiving
• Socio-economic and legal issues
• Metadata extraction and curation
• Ontologies and data dictionaries
• Provenance and databases
• Data transformation, integration and publishing
• Supporting technologies
• Networks of trusted digital repositories
• Organisational and cultural challenges to digital
  curation

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DCC Development

• DCC Approach to Digital Curation (white paper)
  sets out the path for development activities
• Monitoring international standards
• Creating testbeds for digital curation tools
• Development of recommendations for tools and
  methods for generating Representation Information
• Development of a Representation Information
  Registry/Repository (DCC RIR)

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• Representation Information
• the DCC Representation Information Repository/
  Registry

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Representation Information
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DCC RIR

• Representation Information Registry/Repository
• An essential service for institutions managing an
  OAIS-type repository
• Envisage network of RIRs
• Authoritative source of RI for a designated
  community
• DCC prototype demonstrator based on 2 key
  concepts to facilitate sharing of the curation
  effort
• Descriptive label (structural, semantic, other
  metadata)
• Curation persistent ID

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RI RIR High-level view
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RIR development as Registry

• Interface and protocols JAXR standard
• freebXML implementation
• many access methods
• URL
• Web Services
• API
• Etc..
• Findability
• Persistent IDs
• What can we rely on?
• Labels (to support automated processing)

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RIR development as Repository

• Trusted repository of Rep. Info
• Authenticity of information
• Access control
• Certificates/Digests
• Extensibility
• Distributed/Shared network

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Shared RIR

• Provides the building blocks for institutions to
  develop their own RI objects according to the
  types of data objects they hold
• Reduces the effort each institution has to expend
• Benefits all those involved in the life cycle of
  data objects
• Data creators
• Data curators
• Data re-users

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Benefits for creators depositors

• Helps content producers and depositors prepare
  materials for ingest by
• Increasing awareness
• Facilitating selection process
• Indicating types of RI to be submitted
• Minimising required RI through cumulative
  deposits

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Benefits for curators

• Availability of a shared RIR offers a broad range
  of benefits for curators, centres, archives and
  libraries
• Cost reduction in running digital archive
• Reduces and shares effort
• Provides tools to work with RI
• Increases range of formats an archive can curate
• Extends time for which files can be useful
• Encourages community building

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Benefits for re-users

• Availability of the RIR for third-party re-users
• Provides trusted, authoritative, secure RI
• Allows users to rely on the authenticity and
  integrity of data sources
• Extends community able to use digital material by
  enabling a large amount of RI to be searched and
  retrieved.

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Future developments

• RIR development activities tracked through
  http//www.dcc.ac.uk
• See also the dcc development wiki
  http//dev.dcc.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
• CASPAR project http//www.casparpreserves.org
• Research programme of the TFPARS

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Further information

• DCC development website http//dev/dcc/ac/uk
• DCC development listserv DCC-DEVELOPMENT_at_JISCMAIL
  .AC.UK
• DCC websitehttp//www.dcc.ac.uk

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Thank You

• Join the DCC Associates Network (its free!)
• http//www.dcc.ac.uk/associates/