Digital Curation in the Human Science
September 30 and October 1, Corfu, Greece.

Read the workshop on Dlib Magazine here.

Workshop Objectives:

The aim of the workshop is to act as a focus for a fruitful dialogue among major stakeholders in human science research infrastructures: policy makers and planners of the emerging European digital infrastructures, computer science and information science researchers in the field of digital libraries, e-repository, collections and data managers, practising curators, archivists and librarians, and active researchers from the whole spectrum of the human sciences interested into, or dependent upon, the use of information resources and tools for research.This long overdue meeting of complementary perspectives will, hopefully, act as a catalyst for a convergence of conceptual and technical approaches between different projects, in Europe and beyond, and for an alignment of current efforts with the actual requirements, know-how and expertise of key user communities.

Workshop Theme:

Research in the human sciences is predominantly information-driven, often idiographic rather than nomothetic, and dependent on complex associations of phenomena, differentiated disciplinary languages, and divergent theoretical and methodological perspectives. Unlike the natural sciences, the outcome of earlier work, manifested in massive webs of monographs, research papers and encyclopaedic works, retains its value in the "long tail". Large-scale digitization in cultural heritage, the arts and letters, together with the explosion of born-digital information on contemporary societies, pose significant new challenges of resource discovery and interoperability, producing a need for interdisciplinary, collaborative research agendas and action plans to tackle issues of long-term digital preservation and adequate knowledge representation of information in a number of scholarly domains. The information resources on which the production and reproduction of knowledge in the human sciences depends are increasingly reconfigured in the form of digital libraries, digital collections and e- repositories.

Digital curation, an important theme in ECDL 2009, aims to address exactly this pressing need to ensure future epistemic adequacy of information objects on which knowledge in the human sciences depends. It encompasses a set of activities aiming at the production of high quality, dependable digital assets; their organisation, archiving and long-term preservation; and the generation of added value from digital assets by means of resource-based knowledge elicitation. The need to ensure adequate representation and long-term access to digital information as its context of use changes introduces a grand challenge for digital curation research: to develop the conceptual and technological tools necessary for maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use, through the active questioning, dynamic co-evolution and adequate knowledge representation of its epistemic and pragmatic content and context.

This workshop aims to provide a focus for a broad-ranging discussion on issues related to the conceptualisation, design, development and functioning of planned digital research infrastructures for the human sciences, in Europe and beyond, from a digital curation perspective. It concerns directly the theory and practice of research digital libraries, at the conceptual, technical and organisational level, and will facilitate the exchange of ideas, best practices and the convergence of future directions between projects of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) in the human sciences (such as DARIAH, CLARIN, and CESDDA), in the context of similar developments across the Atlantic. The programme will consist of presentations of current developments in these project, invited position papers on key issues of digital curation, research repositories and digital libraries, and a stakeholders’ panel on requirements for digital infrastructures in the human sciences.

Chairs:

Costis Dallas, Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; and, Digital Curation Unit (DCU), "Athena" Research Centre, Greece
Peter Doorn, Data Archiving and Networking Service (DANS), The Netherlands

Program Committee:

Panos Constantopoulos, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business; and, Digital Curation Unit (DCU), "Athena" Research Centre, Greece
Costis Dallas (Chair), Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; and, Digital Curation Unit (DCU), "Athena" Research Centre, Greece
Martin Doerr, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation Research and Technology, Greece
Peter Doorn (Chair), Data Archiving and Networking Service (DANS), The Netherlands
Seamus Ross, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada
Helen Tibbo, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina, United States