Data Curation and Digital Preservation: A View from the UK (Part 12)

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC; www.dcc.ac.uk) has been established and funded by the UK government to provide leadership to the academic community on the related problems of scientific data curation and the long-term digital preservation of scholarly output. The funders awarded the bid to a consortium of four UK institutions, led by the University of Edinburgh, to provide a range of services for the initial three years of the centre's funding. The other partners are the University of Glasgow's Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils at Rutherford and Daresbury Appleton Laboratories, and the UK Office for Library and Information Networking at Bath. Each site will contribute a different expertise to the Centre, which is currently in the set-up phase of its operation. This paper will describe how a widely distributed partnership is being managed to achieve several 'proper tensions:' between the needs of the hard sciences, which represent one end of the continuum, and the needs of the soft disciplines of the social sciences and humanities along the other end; between the need for cutting edge research which will improve the state of knowledge about preservation and database curation, and the need for quick development of tools tuned to the immediate needs of the users; and among a vast array of international standards efforts and preservation tools developed under hugely disparate circumstances, all of which will be in competition for certification or publicity by the Centre, to be rubber-stamped (or not) as deserving adoption by communities of practice. Peter Burnhill, Director (Phase One) of the DCC during the set-up phase, will outline some of the drivers behind the decision to set-up the Centre, the strategy being adopted to engage such a diverse range of communities, and the approach being taken to make an organisation from four partner institutions, drawing upon experience gained in setting up the EDINA National Data Centre nine years ago. Robin Rice, Phase One Project Coordinator, will describe what the social sciences have both to offer and to learn from the other disciplines in the emerging fields of data curation and digital preservation, with a focus on the current state of the art and the challenges ahead.