I am pleased to announce that Professor Seamus Ross will be the keynote
speaker at the 2006 NHPRC Electronic Records Research Fellows Symposium,
Friday, October 6, 2006 in Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. This promises
to be a great beginning to a wonderful day. Following Professor Ross, the
2005 Fellows will present the findings from their research projects and the
2006 Fellows will give us a glimpse into what they will be doing during the
upcoming year. Dr. Paul Conway will provide a critique of the projects. This
event is free and open to the public but we encourage you to register to
facilitate our planning for the event at: http://sils.unc.edu/news/nhprc/

Please visit our website for more information:
http://www.ils.unc.edu/nhprcfellows/.

Title: Uncertainty, Risk, Trust, and Digital Persistency
Author: Seamus Ross, Director HATII University of Glasgow and Associate
Director of the UK's Digital Curation Centre

Digital preservation and curation is, in part, about the management of
uncertainty and the engendering of trust. Management of uncertainty
underpins mechanisms for ensuring the authenticity, integrity, and
provenance of digital materials. The conversion of uncertainties into
measurable and manageable risks involves an appreciation of the preservation
pressure points and the methods, technologies, and processes that can be
employed to ameliorate them.  To manage risks associated with the fragility
of digital objects auditable processes, workflows, and methods need to be
supported by guidelines, metadata, a richer understanding of the nature of
digital objects, and tools. Current research in digital preservation and
curation is making strides towards better defining risks and ways of
avoiding and managing them. 
The discussion of approaches to measuring uncertainty and managing risk in
digital curation is set against the backdrop of the work of key European
projects in the area of digital preservation and curation.  These include
the work of The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the UK,
DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific
knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval), PLANETS (Preservation and
Long-term Access through NETworked Services),   
Digital Preservation Cluster of the DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital
Libraries (DELOS-DPC), and ERPANET (Electronic Resource Preservation and
Access Network). All these projects are contributing to the global effort to
address the challenges which make long term accessibility of digital
materials an uncertain activity and risks difficult to assess and manage.

Seamus Ross, Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation, and
Director of Humanities Computing and Information Management at the
University of Glasgow, runs HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and
Information Institute) (http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk) of which he is the
founding director. He is an Associate Director of the Digital Curation
Centre in the UK (http://www.dcc.ac.uk), a co-principal investigator in the
DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence (http://www.dpc.delos.ac.uk),
and Principal Director of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE)
(http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu). He was Principal Director of
ERPANET a European Commission activity to enhance the preservation of
cultural heritage and scientific digital objects (http://www.erpanet.org),
and a key player in The Digital Culture Forum (DigiCULT Forum) which worked
to improve the take-up of cutting edge research and technology by the
cultural heritage sector (http://www.digicult.info). Before joining the
University of Glasgow he was Head of ICT at the British Academy and a
technologist at a company specialising in knowledge engineering. He earned a
doctorate from the University of Oxford.  Some of his publications are
available at http://eprints.erpanet.org  During 2005/6 Seamus Ross is
Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) and
Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College (Oxford).

-Helen

Dr. Helen R. Tibbo, Professor
School of Information and Library Science
201 Manning Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
[log in to unmask]
Tel: 919.962.8063
Fax: 919.962.8071


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