Data curation
Amongst the various types of digital materials that organisations need to take account of in their digital preservation planning, perhaps the most significant current challenge is how to deal with 'data'. This term should be understood broadly to mean all forms of unmediated information that are generated as result of scientific and scholarly activity. The effective capture, storage, re-use and appraisal of data is a very significant challenge to a wide range of institutions, many of whom are exploiting automated methods for generating very large amounts of information, including sensor and scanning equipment capable of generating data measurable in petabytes per annum.
JISC is making significant investments in this area to support the UK university sector in meeting these challenges and the establishment of the JISC Research Data Programme (2009-2011) is a response to the requirements that have emerged from a number of reports over the last few years. Another significant investment is the JISC funded Digital Curation Centre (founded in 2004) which will proceed to a third phase of funding from February 2010 and will focus particularly on supporting UK HEI's to manage and curate research (and other) data effectively.
Relevant work