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Showing posts from May, 2016

Research data - what does it *really* look like?

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Work continues on our Filling the Digital Preservation Gap project and I thought it was about time we updated you on some of the things we have been doing. While my colleague Julie has been focusing on the more technical issues of implementing Archivematica for research data. I have been looking at some real research data and exploring in more detail some of the issues we discussed in our phase 1 report . For the past year, we have been accepting research data for longer term curation. Though the systems for preservation and access to this data are still in development, we are for the time being able to allocate a DOI for each dataset, manage access and store it safely (ensuring it isn't altered) and intend to ingest it into our data curation systems once they are ready. Having this data in one place on our filestore does give me the opportunity to test the hypothesis in our first report about the wide range of file formats that will be present in a research dataset and also the as

Why AtoM?

A long time ago I started to talk about how we needed a new archival management system . I described the process of how we came up with a list of requirements to find a system that would meet our needs. People sometimes ask me about AtoM and why we chose it so I thought it would be useful to publish our requirements and how the system performed against these. It is also interesting at this point - post launch to go back and review what we thought we knew about AtoM when we first made the selection back in 2014. Not only has our understanding of AtoM moved on since then, but the functionality of the system itself has moved on (and will move on again when version 2.3 is released). For several of the requirements, my initial assessment was negative or recorded only a partial success and coming back to it now, it is clear that things have improved. I also discovered that for one of the requirements, I had recorded AtoM has having met it but experience and further research has demonstrated