Because good research needs good data

'What's New' Issue 42: February 2012

Magdalena Getler | 08 February 2012

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and Digital Curation Centre (DCC) are delighted to announce a new issue of our joint newsletter ‘What’s New’.

In the February issue:

WHAT'S ON: Forthcoming events from February 2012 onwards

WHAT'S NEW: New reports and initiatives since the last issue

WHAT'S WHAT: Institutional Research Data Management services: a growing trend - Sarah Jones, DCC

The DCC has witnessed a sharp growth in the number of Universities developing Research Data Management strategies and services. We’re seeing an increasing number of institutional data management policies, reskilling of subject/liaison librarians, and the extension of institutional repositories to collect metadata on research data – or in some cases to collect and store the data itself.

So why is Research Data Management on university agendas?

The requirements to manage and share data have strengthened in the last year. The RCUK Common Principles on Data Policy provide coherence across the Research Councils and clarify the responsibilities of researchers and research organisations. The EPSRC Policy Framework on Research Data is particularly significant in this regard, as it sets a clear timeframe for institutions to develop and implement a roadmap for Research Data Management.

The JISC Research Data Management programmes have also been hugely influential. Several million has been invested across the two programmes, targeting specific strands of activity, namely: the development of institutional infrastructure; data management planning; disciplinary training; and citation & data publishing. Many outputs from these programmes have gained international impact and are being reused in new contexts. The tools that were selected to be developed into shared services in particular hold much promise...Read more

WHO'S WHO: Sixty second interview with Kate Jennings, Tate

Where do you work and what's your job title?

I work in the conservation department at Tate, my title is Time-based Media Conservator.

Tell us a bit about your organisation

Tate holds the National Collection of British art from 1500, and international modern and contemporary art from 1900. Tate's collection embraces all media from painting, drawing, sculpture and prints, to photography, video and film, installation and performance. It is displayed at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives and through loans to temporary national and international exhibitions. When the Tate Gallery opened in 1897, its collection consisted of the 65 works gifted by Henry Tate to the Nation. Today the collection consists of approximately 66,000 works of art by over 3,000 artists.

What projects are you working on at the moment?

Time-based media conservation is responsible for art in the collection which is dependent on electronic technology for display and has duration as a dimension. This includes video, film, and software-based artworks. Up until relatively recently when a video work was acquired artists would supply their master format to Tate on tape, for example Digital Betacam and Mini DV.

However, over the last two years we have noticed a big shift from tape to file and artworks are now generally supplied to us on external hard drives. We are now adjusting our conservation practice to reflect this shift. We are currently improving our facilities in order to carry out more technical work in-house, and in tandem are experimenting with MXF and particularly its metadata recording abilities to capture the technical information we gather from artists at acquisition. We are working to blend this with our existing time-based media documentation system which was originally designed around physical video tape and motion picture film...Read more

ONE WORLD: Digital Preservation in France - Louise Fauduet, Bibliothèque nationale de France

YOUR VIEW?: Comments and views from readers