Planning

Introduction - Paul Wilson | The PAWDOC collection was initiated in 1981 to support research into new office systems at the National Computing Centre in Manchester. The author continued to use the collection to manage all his documents throughout his subsequent IT career. The collection’s index contains six fields (Ref No, Title, Movement Status, Publication Date, Date Last Accessed, and Creation Date). Each of the 17,000 Index entries related to one or more of some 29,000 electronic files of a wide variety of file types stored in a Document Management System.

When the Library of Congress first issued the Recommended Formats Statement, one aim was to provide our staff with guidance on the technical characteristics of formats, which they could consult in the process of recommending and acquiring content. But we were also aware that preservation and long-term access to digital content is an interest shared by a wide variety of stakeholders and not simply a parochial concern of the Library. Nor did we have any mistaken impression that we would get all the right answers on our own or that the characteristics would not change over time.

Volume 18, Issue 2

In the era of research infrastructures and big data, sophisticated data management practices are becoming essential building blocks of successful science. Most practices follow a data-centric approach, which does not take into account the processes that created, analysed and presented the data. This fact limits the possibilities for reliable verification of results. Furthermore, it does not guarantee the reuse of research, which is one of the key aspects of credible data-driven science.

Serendipity, generally thought of as accidental good fortune, has long been a staple of popular science. The notion of fortuitous discovery still has strong appeal, but could it encourage innovation? Antony Funnell meets researchers who not only believe in serendipity, but are actively trying to engineer it.

More and more countries are making collected efforts to provide ORCID identifiers for their researchers and encouraging implementation of ORCID iDs into the national and local research information infrastructure.

This research explored the skills, knowledge and qualities, and professional education needs, of information professionals in galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) in Australia. These cultural heritage institutions have always had a role in allowing us to experience, explore and interpret our world by enabling people to engage with information in multiple forms through their mutual core functions of acquiring, organising, storing, providing access to and preserving information.

This research explored the skills, knowledge and qualities, and professional education needs, of information professionals in galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) in Australia. These cultural heritage institutions have always had a role in allowing us to experience, explore and interpret our world by enabling people to engage with information in multiple forms through their mutual core functions of acquiring, organising, storing, providing access to and preserving information.

In this edition of the Insights Interview series for the NDSA Innovation Working Group, I was excited to talk with Bradley Daigle, director of digital curation services and digital strategist for special collections at the University of Virginia, and R. F. (Chip) German Jr., program director of the APTrust, about the Academic Preservation Trust.

Lauren: Tell us about the Academic Preservation Trust and how the organization addresses the needs of member institutions.

The digital preservation community is a connected and collaborative one. I first heard about the Europe-based PREFORMA project last summer at a Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meeting when we were discussing the Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting comparison matrix. My interest was piqued because I heard about their incorporation of FFV1 and Matroska, both included in our matrix but not yet well adopted within the federal community.