Here’s the preliminary announcement for Open Repositories 2012, the next in this excellent series of conferences.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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The University of Edinburgh Information Services, EDINA, and the Digital Curation Centre are delighted to announce that the University of Edinburgh has been selected to host the Seventh International Conference on Open Repositories (OR12) July 9-13th July, 2012.
The call for proposals will be available from the conference web site soon: or2012.ed.ac.uk
The University George Square Campus is located in the centre of Edinburgh a short distance from the iconic Edinburgh Castle in the Old Town and numerous attractions, venues, restaurants and pubs.
Open Repositories is run by an international steering committee of experts, and has been the pre-eminent conference for repository managers, researchers and developers to share developments across national boundaries and technical platforms since 2006. OR 2011 was hosted at the University of Texas, Austin USA; OR 2010 was hosted in Madrid.
The theme and title of the 2012 conference at Edinburgh – Open Services for Open Content: Local In for Global Out – reflects the current move towards open content, ‘augmented content’, distributed systems, microservices and data delivery infrastructures. Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) will chair the Programme Committee.
The conference will feature both general conference sessions and user group meetings for the three main open source repository platforms: DSpace, Fedora, and EPrints. There will also be a strand for the popular ‘Repository Fringe’, an informal, creative gathering of repository managers and developers which has been hosted at the University of Edinburgh each year since 2008 – to coincide with the internationally well known Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Whether integrated into external research, or teaching and learning workflows, repositories form a key component to ensure that digital output within academic institutions can be accessed more widely. They are changing the nature of scholarly communication across universities, research laboratories, libraries and publishers. Repositories are now being deployed across sectors (education, research, science, cultural heritage) and at all levels (national, regional, institutional, project, lab, personal). The aim of the Open Repositories Conference is to bring those responsible for the development, implementation and management of digital repositories together with stakeholders to address theoretical, practical, and strategic issues: across the entire lifecycle of information, from the creation and management of digital content, to enabling use, re-use, and interconnection of information, and ensuring long-term preservation and archiving. The current economic climate dictates that repositories operate across administrative and disciplinary boundaries and to interact with distributed computational services and social communities.
The University of Edinburgh retains a unique position in the UK’s repository landscape, serving as home to:
* The Digital Curation Centre, the UK’s leading hub of expertise and national focus for research and development into digital curation. The DCC promotes good practice and training in the management of all research outputs in digital format. See http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ for more.
* EDINA, the JISC-funded national data centre at the University, supporting all universities and colleges across the UK. EDINA delivers a range of online data services including a number of repository initiatives: Open Access Repository Junction, OpenDepot.org, and ShareGeo Open. See http://edina.ac.uk/ for more.
* The Digital Library Section and Edinburgh University Data Library serve researchers and students at the University as part of its Information Services. See http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/about/organisation
o The Data Library provides research data support for university researchers and hosts the Edinburgh DataShare repository service for researchers to deposit and share research data.
o DLS supports repositories of research publications to support the University’s Open Access Publications Policy and is currently implementing a Current Research Information System (CRIS). DLS also provides technical and administrative support to the Scottish Digital Library Consortium (SDLC), which provides repository services to universities across Scotland.
* The University’s School of Informatics supports IDEALab, a virtual laboratory that facilitates prototyping of novel applications of state-of-art informatic technologies, forming part of the New Institute for eResearch. See http://idea.ed.ac.uk/IDEA/Welcome.html for more.
For further information visit URL: or2012.ed.ac.uk or email:
or2012@ed.ac.uk; Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/group/open-repositories