ex-cite: an unconference on citation in digital environment

December 16th 2006
Florence, Italy

Report

ex-cite unconference report now available [PDF 20KB]

Introduction

One of the most important requirements of the scholarly research is the verifiability of the sources of information referenced by citations. Scholarly publications in today's digital environment are more and more relying on networked sources (e.g. through web citations or URL), but the stability and persistency of web resources is a problem, cause they could be discontinued (e.g. 404 error) or could change over time. The Workshop's focus is to investigate and discuss how the instability of web resources and the unreliability of web resources citations can affect scientific work evaluation, and what digital preservation procedures can actually do in this field.

Despite of initiatives and proposed solutions (e.g. including in a citation the original URL and the Internet Archive URL of a copy which was archived on a date as close as possible to the date on which the original was obtained (Dempsey 2006), or new services like WebCite, or initiatives like International Internet Preservation Consortium), there is a general consensus that a lot of work remains to be done in this field, especially with regard to referenced resources that are not freely available on the Internet, being accessible only on a subscription basis (this implies formal agreements with the producer or an appropriate regulation framework like the extension of legal deposit legislation or practices to the digital resources). Moreover, maintaining viability of a digital resource does not mean ensuring its renderability and understandability (PREMIS 2005 [PDF]).

Examples of Topics to be discussed (not exhaustive list)

• technical requirements a digital resource should have to be permanently accessible
• technologies and possible support services to enable their use
• standards
• persistent identifiers
• digital preservation formats
• obstacles and constraints: e.g. intellectual property rules and laws, DRM systems, commercial knowledge distribution systems
• institutional stakeholders responsibility
• legal or voluntary deposit role
• open archives and open access contents persistency
• search engines role with respect to contents outcropping or disappearance
• deep web

format

The Workshop's format will be an Unconference, based on the famous Dave Winer Law of conventional conferences : "The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage", and on the following principles:

• "First, you take the people who used to be the audience and give them a promotion.
  • They're now participants.
  • Their job is to participate, not just to listen and at the end to ask questions.
  • Then you ask everyone who was on stage to take a seat in what used to be the audience."
• An unconference is not a brainstorming: it is an highly structured event.
• There will be a dicussion leader i.e. "someone who knows something about the topic of discussion ... and knows how to ask questions and knit a story together".

So all the participants are needed to actively contribute to the discussion, that will be held entirely in English. Professor Seamus Ross will be the Discussion Leader.

Venue

Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Piazza dei Giudici 1, Florence, h. 9.00 a.m. - 1 p.m.