"Digital Curation: digital archives, libraries, and e - science"

Introduction and Welcome
Neil Beagrie
Assistant Director, JISC London Office
Secretary, Digital Preservation Coalition

This Invitational seminar has been jointly organised and sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the British National Space Centre (BNSC) and brings together key organisations involved in creating, managing, and providing access to digital information across a wide range of sectors.

There is growing awareness of the urgent challenges of improving long-term management of and preserving access to, digital information.  This seminar will attempt to:
•	raise the profile of relevant UK and international standards and initiatives amongst colleagues in the UK; 
•	show their application in the sciences, libraries and archives, and in the educational sector and beyond; 
•	and illustrate their role in securing and promoting access to the digital outputs of research and other activities for current and future generations.

In explaining the development of this seminar and collaboration between the BNSC and the DPC it is useful to identify three key developments:

1.The imminent approval of the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) Reference Model as an ISO standard. Developed under the auspices of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) and NASA, the OAIS model has emerged as the first international standard for digital archiving and preservation.  Although emerging from the space and earth observation communities, it has had significant input from the library and archives sectors particularly on preservation planning.  Within the UK, the BSNC/PPARC/NERC has sponsored David Giaretta's involvement in CCSDS activities including chairing the panel charged with the development of the OAIS model.  The JISC has also funded participation in OAIS by the AHDS, Cedars, and the JISC Preservation Focus.  As a result the OAIS model has been heavily promoted in UK digital preservation initiatives and indeed overseas.  Both the members of the DPC and the BNSC felt this was an opportune time to draw the OAIS model to the attention of a wider UK audience and shared the experience of cognate projects.  By collaborating on this seminar we have been able to bring representatives from the earth observation and space communities, library and archives, industry, and research councils together.

2.The launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition.  This is the first event to be held by the newly formed DPC. The DPC is an emerging cross-sectoral coalition of 15 + major organisations formed to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base. Members include JISC, Wellcome Trust, Consortium of University Research Libraries, British Library, Public Record Office, National Archives of Scotland, OCLC, and the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, RLG, National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, and the University of London Computing Centre amongst others. Its members wish to support international initiatives, highlight work being undertaken by member institutions, and work closely with the e-science programme.  We have therefore jointly organised and sponsored this seminar to further these aims.  

Further information on the Coalition is included in the seminar packs and I hope membership amongst research councils and those involved in e-science will continue to grow.

3. The third and final development has been establishment of the e-science programme to develop the research grid. E-science refers to science increasingly done through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections, terascale computing resources and high performance visualisation. As the infrastructure and computational power the grid is developed data curation issues are also being identified and addressed.

This seminar has arisen at the intersection of these three developments.  We have been fortunate to secure the involvement of leading speakers and participants from the UK and overseas.  We hope it will provide many new insights and active discussion.  

A report on the seminar is being prepared by Philip Pothen of the JISC London Office's communications team. It will be made available on the web together with the speakers presentations.  Please feel free to use this as the basis for your own reports to colleagues and to draw this work to the notice of those who have not been present today.