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Call for Papers
Collective Curation: the many hands that make data work
It takes a community to raise a child, so the proverb goes, and the same applies to digital content. Many stakeholders play a role in ensuring digital objects are properly created, managed and shared. Entire research communities need to agree on standards for data sharing, for example, and actions taken by content creators and curators have a huge impact on the ability for others to find, evaluate, understand and reuse objects. Decisions can empower or marginalise communities, and records can hold great power to help restore identity, promote truth and support reconciliation.
With modern technology, anyone can be a content creator and provider with a potentially worldwide audience. The original intention of the internet as trusted sites of authority exchanging data of known quality has been overtaken by the flood of content on the world wide web. In this landscape, how do we evaluate and exchange information and ensure meaningful knowledge production? How do we harness the freedom and inclusiveness of the Web while enabling effective curation? How do we ensure that content is preserved for long-term accessibility?
The 15th International Digital Curation Conference takes place in Dublin in collaboration with the Digital Repository of Ireland. DRI is a certified trusted digital repository for Ireland’s social and cultural data, and is widely engaged in a host of research projects spanning digital cultural heritage, research data management, Open Science policy and training, data preservation in the humanities and social sciences, and best practices in digital archiving and open repository architecture. DRI has organised and hosted dozens of conferences large and small including its biannual conference, DPASSH (Digital Preservation in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), and the Research Data Alliance plenary.
Papers are invited to address one or more of the themes below
Social, political and cultural implications of digital curation
- Who controls the past, controls the future – empowering community ownership of collections and the role of records to restore justice following cultural trauma
- Participatory archiving, citizen science and radical collaboration
- The people behind the data – acknowledging their role, influence and bias
- Climate change and digital curation – what might our work look like in 20-50 years?
- Partner and prosper – how content creators and curators should come together
- Community-owned and open source solutions – a way for the education sector to keep control of the scholarly commons and its intellectual output?
Trust: assessing content and containers
- Metrics and methods to assess, validate and communicate data quality within and across communities of use
- Frameworks to certify services as trustworthy and robust
- Persistence: all kinds of identifiers and their role in ensuring trust
- Disruptive technologies and their role in automated verification and authentication
- All that glitters is not gold – how to make and communicate appropriate selection decisions and innovative approaches to appraisal?
- Rethinking repositories into active research spaces and collaborative partners
- In the era of fake news, how do we trust digital content and its representations in media?
Data stewardship
- Data stewards, data agents, data champions and institutional units – shaping, positioning and recognising new roles
- Engaging and supporting researchers: examples of co-designing solutions and interdisciplinarity
- Embedding data stewardship in research ecosystems – workflows, accountability and recognition
- Research assessment – crediting involvement in the creation, curation and sharing of data
- Defining competencies, curricula and educational programmes to address skills gaps – for researchers, data producers, data stewards, research data management librarians and others
- Networking and fora for information exchange and skills sharing across institutions
- Promoting standardisation to achieve more harmonized practices
- Empowering communities to define data standards and sharing agreements
Preservation planning
- Lessons learned from the review, evaluation and re-validation of curated content
- Curation workflows: linkages between digital triage, preservation actions and archiving
- Managing de-accession – when does content lose its value?
- National and global approaches to addressing digital preservation challenges
- Preservation at scale: how can we collaborate and partner on preservation?
- Preservation challenges in the humanities, social sciences and cultural heritage
- Long term preservation failures – lessons learnt
- Open source technologies and open standards for long term preservation
Submissions
Submission types include papers, lightning talks, demonstrations and posters on the above themes. We also welcome workshop submissions on any relevant topic.