19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Data Archiving

The Digital Curation Centre

Dr. David Giaretta (d.l.giaretta@rl.ac.uk)
Digital Curation Centre, CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has been set up in the UK, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Councils e-Science Core Programme (eSCP). Its remit is research into and support of the curation and preservation of digital data and publications. 'Digital Curation' is increasingly being used for the actions needed to maintain and utilise digital data and research results over their entire life-cycle for current and future generations of users.

Because its funding and its remit link arts, humanities, libraries as well as e-Science, and it provides a combination of outreach, service provision, research and development, the DCC is well placed to play an important role both in the UK as well as internationally. As an example of the synergy which may be exploited one may consider the analogy between the situation of e-Science users who may draw together, from many different systems, digital information which is unfamiliar to them, to that of future generations of users who may also be unfamiliar with that data, and their information systems will be even more different. These different aspects of Curation, namely "use" and "preservation" allows planning for the future to be intimately linked to, and make more relevant by, the need to make the best use of digital data today, highlighting interoperability, metadata management and data management. This presentation will explore further the implications of these and other ideas and will also give an update on the status of the Digital Curation Centre.