Resources of interest in digital networks originate from a wide variety of sources, and may carry identifiers from different established public schemes, official standards, de facto schemes, or private cataloguing numbering. A key step in facilitating preservation, re-use and exchange of information is to enable users to re-use these identifiers (and their associated data) across different applications. Such interoperability of identifiers encompasses not only technical aspects of interoperability but consideration of the purpose and community of use of the identifiers. Download the Briefing paper in PDF

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services (Planets), Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR) are delighted to announce their 3rd annual Conference taking place in Nice, France, on 28-30 October 2008.

This Conference aims to attract digital content owners and managers, bringing them together with the leading experts in digital preservation, to make them aware of the challenges and to present the solutions developed and identified by DPE, Planets and CASPAR, the main preservation projects co-funded by the European Commission. Unique to this conference will be the heavy emphasis on practical demonstrations of preservation solutions that can be adopted and implemented today. More Info

Efficiently managing enormous quantities of government data requires the development and deployment of robust, sustainable and interoperable metadata regimes. Governments need metadata to manage, understand, enable access to, and preserve their vital data assets over time and across domains of use. Different communities of practitioners think of metadata differently because of its different uses. ICT professionals think of metadata as data that describes data and data systems: that is, the structure of databases, their characteristics, location and usage. Information management professionals, on the other hand, regard metadata as structured information that describes and/or enables finding, managing, controlling, understanding or preserving other information over time. In other words, metadata documents the content, context and structure of
information resources in order to support the ongoing use of those resources. see the paper in pdf

DRAMBORA, the repository audit method based on risk assessment, recently joined the Data Audit Framework, a tool to identify research data assets and improve data management, at a joint launch of their online tools last week. These two online audit tools help institutions manage their research data and maximise its long-term reuse potential. The event was a great success and you can find more details of the event including presentations are available online here.

Based on practical research and developed jointly by the DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) provides a methodology for self-assessment of digital preservation repositories. The toolkit, now available as an interactive online audit tool (www.repositoryaudit.eu), has been evaluated and applied across a diverse range of organisations, such as national libraries, scientific data centres and archives. DPE is organising a series of training courses to train new DRAMBORA auditors. The first of these will be held in association with the Wepreserve training event in Prague, in October 2008. More Info