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    February 15th, 2010LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    E-Books and E-Content 2010

    University College London, 11 May 2010, 10.00 to 17.00

    www.econtent2010.com
    Data as Content

    This year’s econtent meeting will consider the emerging and fundamental role of data as content. Once confined to analysts and researchers, raw data in the form of databases, databanks, images and spreadsheets has become easier to store, easier to make accessible and even to publish. This in turn has led to expectations from users as to its availability and prompted the need for a range of tools and techniques to deal with the burgeoning demand. Key issues are: how can such content be managed to ensure its longevity through digital curation and systematic preservation; the need for new standards to enable links with traditional formats and the narrower world of regular scholarly publishing; metadata and taxonomy – how we describe datasets and make them accessible and searchable; and perhaps of most concern, issues of validity and accuracy.

    This conference will look at data in all its different formats, address the key issues of storage, manipulation and transfer and look also at the commercial possibilities of marketing data. It will also address the emerging role of institutional repositories in acting as a vehicle to manage data. As usual there will be a panel of international experts who are able to take a wide ranging look at the topic in an intense one day event. It will be of interest across the board from librarians seeking to manage their organisational data sets and create structure around them, to publishers looking at the commercial opportunities, scientists and researchers and other information gatekeepers, and finally anyone with a technical interest in data management.

    The morning session will bring together a panel of highly respected expert speakers from the UK and Europe including Dr Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network, Helle Lauridsen of Proquest – who will talk about how bibliographic services are addressing the information management aspects of data archiving; Matt Day of Nature.com who will present on the ethics and policies of sharing data in scientific communities, and Dr Jan Brase of the German Technical Library and also the recently appointed Manager of Datacite (www.datacite.org). He will present a review of how libraries might be involved in this emerging landscape. Dr Simon Hodson, the Programme Manager for Managing Research Data at JISC, will look at the UK national scene.

    The afternoon will include a series of presentations on recent projects exploiting the infrastructure required to deliver research data management. This will include June Finch from Manchester University, Kenji Takeda from Southampton University and James Wilson from Oxford. They will be followed by a plenary session chaired by Anthony Watkinson of UCL, who will bring together the day’s experts and others to debate this emerging concept, and what role the major players occupy.