Management and Curation of Digital Assets
Since its foundation, HATII has had major research strengths in digital preservation, curation and data management with a particular emphasis on collaborative, translational research in national and international projects.
Our research is considering the implications of the digital environment beyond the mechanical and technical and towards the complex questions that surround our ICT-enabled audit and compliance cultures, and particularly the relationship with such facilities as automation, the semantic web, social networking and mobile devices. These raise significant management issues about the role of disruptive technologies, relativism, the contrast between private and public space in the shape, for example, of hand-held devices and diaries as opposed to servers and blogs, and the consequent blurring of the distinction between corporate/institutional and private communication.
Under the guidance of Kim the BlogForever project BlogForever is building an exciting new system to harvest, preserve and manage blog content, developing new insights through its restructuring and reuse. It has stepped into uncharted territories of theoretical and practical aspects of blog preservation, first researching blog structure and semantics and is currenly defining blog preservation policies and developing a robust blog preservation software platform.
Research and practice in records management and digital preservation has shown that keeping everything is unmanageable and thus strategic questions around the ‘value’ of information become increasingly significant. Traditionally archival and records management appraisal have addressed this issue, but the processes are opaque to those outside these professions. All of these questions have gained even greater significant given the scale of digital data now being generated and the increased complexity of digital objects. DigCurV (Digital Curator Vocational Education Europe) addresses the availability of vocational training for digital curators in the library, archive, museum and cultural heritage sectors. HATII has led the development of a curriculum framework for continuous professional development in digital curation.
The Digital Curation Centre has almost a decades expertise in digital curation and provides a national focus for research into the preservation and management of digital research data. Most recently they have been building capacity and capability for Research Data management via a series of institutional engagements. Meanwhile the DaMSSI projects (DaMSSI & DaMSSi-ABC) have been funded by the JISC and the Research Information Network to support projects developing training materials in the JISC Managing Research Data programmes. HATII has delivered both projects on behalf of the DCC.