SAVE THE DATES: Open Repositories Conference in Edinburgh July 9-13, 2012

[Carol Minton Morris]

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:
or2...@ed.ac.uk; Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/group/open-repositories