Open Repositories 07

I traveled to San Antonio on January 23 to attend Open Repositories 07. I actually attempted to travel on January 22, but was stopped by severe fog. I almost didn't get there on the 23rd (no planes coming in the day before translates to none that can leave), and my bag didn't get there until hours after I did. But that's a lengthy entry for elsewhere.

Because of my travel woes, I missed the entire first day of Fedora sessions, including my own -- Sandy got someone to switch with me, so all was well on that front.

Wednesday morning I gave my Fedora best practices talk, focusing on the process for the development of content models. Wednesday afternoon I gave my talk on UVa's principles of digital curation. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who were really interested in what I had to say, requested copies of the talk, and/or asked me to give the talk at their institution. It's a framing of our goals and activities in the digital curation realm, and seems to have struck a nerve with many as a good approach. I'm in the process of expanding this material into a chapter for a book.

Not surprisingly, I'm a big fan of James Hilton. I recommend Peter Murray's synopsis on his blog, as he;s already said everything that I could say.

I hope that presentations are going to be posted, because there are a number that I recommend. Kaare Christiansen's talk on object validation strategies at the State and University Library of Denmark presented some really promising workflow tools. Atsuko Takano's talk on the CURATOR institution repository at Chiba University discussed some interesting categories of data that they're collecting, including overlay journals, e-science, and output from alumni. MacKenzie Smith's talk on PLEDGE presented interesting experiments in policy enforcement in a grid environment. Joan Smith's talk on mod-OAI presented some interesting experiments in enabling web sites to better describe themselves for preservation purposes. Christiaan Kortekaas's talk on the Fez project is increasingly relevant to me, as I know we need to set up a self-deposit environment. Carl Lagoze's talk on the OAI Object Re-Use & Exchange (ORE) initiative clarified many issues for me. Julie Allinson's talk on the Eprints Application Profile presented an interesting FRBR model for eprint representation.

We had an exciting content model working group meeting where we appear to have become a formal-ish working group. One set of us will be working on documenting practices, content models, and disseminators. Another set of us will work on formal representations of content models in an architecture. I'm looking forward to working on the former and seeing the output of the latter.