Data Curation Mini-Workshop at UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM2006)

In a joint initiative with the JISC-funded eBank UK and SPECTRa projects, we delivered a workshop that: described the current "state-of-play" in digital curation best practice; used Chemistry as a discipline to illustrate a pro-active approach to data curation, where access, discovery, use, re-use and preservation of the data is fundamental to the advancement of the science; drew on the experience of other disciplines to illustrate user requirements, issues and barriers to implementation of curation methodologies; and identified priority areas for further work to promote data curation amongst the wider community. The workshop began with invited speakers from the discipline of chemistry presenting their experience of curation and exploring the requirements of assuring long-term access to data to support interdisciplinary science. This domain exemplar was complemented by a call for contributions from other disciplines to illustrate their approaches to curation, the common challenges and discipline variation. There was also a moderated discussion session. The outcomes of the workshop will be summarised in a Position Paper, and the individual papers may be published in our electronic journal: the International Journal of Digital Curation.