Management and Curation of Digital Assets

Since its foundation, the Institute has had a strong suit in digital preservation and digitisation through national and international projects. Current projects include PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) that provides a national focus for research in the United Kingdom. Within this context Yunhyong Kim and Seamus Ross are investigating, with funding from the EPSRC e-Science programme, Automated Genre Classification as an essential step in the creation of an over-arching metadata extraction tool that would be effective across disparate information types.

The Institute is considering the implications of the digital environment beyond the mechanical and towards the complex questions that surround our ICT-enabled audit and compliance cultures, and particularly the relationship with such facilities as the semantic web and social networking. These raise significant management issues about the role of disruptive technologies, relativism, the contrast between private and public space in the shape, for example, of hand-held devices and diaries as opposed to servers and blogs, and the consequent blurring of the distinction between corporate/institutional and private communication.

Research and practice in records management and digital preservation has shown that keeping everything is unmanageable and thus strategic questions around the ‘value’ of information become increasingly significant. Traditionally archival and records management appraisal have addressed this issue, but the processes are opaque to those outside these professions. Research on a more wide-ranging approach to value is being conducted particularly by James Currall, initially in the JISC-funded espida project.