DART

For the sixth episode of our DART podcast series, my colleague Steph and I journeyed to Burlington House, the home of The Linnean Society since 1873, to meet with Elaine Charwat, Deputy Librarian for a private tour of its collections.

After a private tour of the environmentally controlled, bomb-proof room, deep in the basement of the society which houses Linnaeus’ research library, the first Systema Naturae, his original specimen collections and a book from 1484 (a Herbal, a book about plants) we sat down in the society’s library to find out more about the collections and their importance from Elaine. Not before getting to grips with the fact that it was in the meeting room of the society that the first official mention of evolution through natural selection, central to Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ (1859), was first publicly discussed at a meeting of the society on 1 July 1858. The joint paper by Darwin and Wallace was entitled ‘On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties’.

In our first episode of 2016 I sat down with Steph Taylor and Ed Pinsent to talk about their new, and free, OAIS online course.

We discussed: why they decided to make the OAIS reference model their first short online course; why OAIS is a useful starting point for people who wish to understand digital preservation; and how the reference model could change for the better. We also discussed the way the online course maps OAIS to a generic preservation workflow, helping to teach the nature of the preservation continuum.

Steph also gave a quick preview of her talk at the upcoming: What I Wish I Knew Before I Started: DPC Student Conference, which takes place on Friday, 22nd January in Senate House.

Our latest DART podcast interview contains a compelling and fascinating interview with Dr Marta Teperek, the Research Data Facilitator at Cambridge University Library’s Research Operations Office. She attended our May Web-Archiving 101 Course (featuring guest speakers Dr Peter Webster and Sara Day Thomson) and seemed to derive a lot of benefit from it. She even published a very positive blog post on the subject.

We thought it would be nice to hear her expand on her views. In the interview that follows, she describes a vibrant scene at Cambridge where websites and blogs – and indeed many other forms of Web 2.0, social media, and interactive web content – have a central role to play in the research data continuum. Far from being a “nice to have” add-on to a researcher’s work, a website can be an evidence base, an interactive communication and feedback tool, a sharing platform, a project management tool, and more besides. Marta confidently describes web content and social media output as part of research documentation and that it should be seen as “our lab book of modern times”.

In the run up to this year's Repository Fringe event, organised by University of Edinburgh, EDINA and the DCC, I sat down with Rory McNicholl, Lead Developer at ULCC to find out more about the event and his talk "Repositories for OA, RDM and beyond".

In our second DART podcast, I got together with Stephanie Taylor, Ed Pinsent and Peter Webster of Webster Research & Consulting, to discuss web archiving – what is it, why it's important to just about everybody, and why the web is not 'preserving itself' - and our upcoming 1-day course 'Web Archiving 101'.

Peter, an expert in archiving the web, will be joining Ed and Steph and Sara Day Thomson of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) as one of the tutors on our Web Archiving 101 course, to be run on 12th May, when we will be addressing how best to archive the web, whether you are a lone researcher wanting to preserve your blog posts and research outputs or planning an organisational-wide strategy for archiving web content.

In our inaugural podcast session I caught up with Stephanie Taylor and Ed Pinsent to discuss the recent BBC interview with Google's Vint Cerf by Pallab Ghosh (Science correspondent, BBC News), their views on the digital dark age and the response by the digital preservation community, spearheaded by William Kilbride and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).