http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/

Digital Futures: from digitization to delivery
7th - 11th April 2008, London, UK.
Including visits to the National Gallery and The National Archives

King’s College London is pleased to announce the
Digital Futures 5-day training event for 2008.
http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/

Led by experts of international renown, Digital
Futures focuses on the development, delivery and
preservation of digital resources from cultural
and memory institutions. Lasting five days,
Digital Futures is aimed at managers and other
practitioners from the library, museum, heritage
and cultural sectors looking to understand the
strategic and management issues of developing
digital resources from digitisation to delivery.

Digital Futures will cover the following core areas:
- Planning and management
- Fund raising and sustainability
- Copyright and IPR
- Visual and image based resource development and delivery
- Metadata - introduction and implementation
- Implementing digital resources
- Digital preservation

There will be visits to 2 institutions to see
behind the scenes and received expert
presentations at the National Gallery and the National Archives.

The agenda is here:
http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digiprog.htm

Digital Futures aims for no more than 25-30
delegates and every delegate will have the
opportunity to also spend one-to-one time with a
Digital Futures leader to discuss issues specific to them.

Digital Futures will issue a certificate of achievement to each delegate.

The Digital Futures leaders are:
Simon Tanner - Director of King’s Digital
Consultancy Services, King’s College London
Tom Clareson - Program Director for New Initiatives, PALINET.
Other experts will be invited to speak in their areas of expertise.

What past delegates say about Digital Futures:
- “Excellent - I would recommend DF to anyone
anticipating a digitization program”
- “I was very pleased. The team was exceptionally
knowledgeable, friendly and personable.”
- “Excellent, informative and enjoyable. Thank you.”
- “Thanks, it has been an invaluable experience.”
- “A really useful course and great fun too!”

Cost: £770 (VAT not charged, excludes accommodation)
Venue: King’s College London, London
Dates: 7th - 11th April 2008

To register, go here:
http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/digireg.htm

The Digital Futures is run by King’s Digital
Consultancy Services and the Centre for Computing
in the Humanities, King’s College London working
in co-operation with PALINET, USA.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Simon Tanner
Director, King’s Digital Consultancy Services
King’s College London
26-29 Drury Lane, 2nd Floor, London WC2B 5RL
tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1678 or +44 (0)7887 691716
email: simon.tanner@kcl.ac.uk
www.digitalconsultancy.net

Digital Futures: 5 day training event for 2008
See: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/digifutures/

For those who are engaged in the business of data stewardship, there are two new documents which might be of help.

Michael Witt and Jake Carlson of Purdue University Libraries have produced a list of 10 questions  that “a librarian can use as a starting point” for a data interview.  They see this as a tool to assist with the identification of data sets to add to the repository and to help with the creation of the necessary infrastructure to do so.  See http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_research/81/ 

From EPrints comes a poster designed to persuade researchers to ensure that their data is properly managed and curated.  It’s a great poster with a strong message.  Take a look at http://www.eprints.org/resources/rgirr2.pdf 

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/12/zotero

The various and competing efforts to digitize university libraries’ vast holdings have no lack of ambition, but access to documents and copyright issues have been two factors slowing the development of online scholarly repositories. Now, an effort at George Mason University seeks to bypass libraries entirely and delve into scholars’ file cabinets instead.

See http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/12/openyale for information on Yale University’s open access course site (only 7 courses so far).

Blurb follows:

“A new online database available from the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) offers the chance to explore nearly 8,000 European oil paintings in Britain’s public art collections.

NICE Paintings (The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings) was launched on 21 November 2007 and will be the first time information on many of the pre-1900 oil paintings have been accessible outside the museums and galleries in which they are housed.

The database has been created by the National Inventory Research Project - a groundbreaking research project designed to gather and present information about Britain’s public art collections. A team of researchers from the University of Glasgow and Birkbeck College University of London visited 200 museums from Penzance to Inverness in order to collate information and shed new light on European paintings from 1200 to 1900. This unique collection is the first phase of a project to record and make public a searchable database of all 22,000 pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings in Britain’s public collections.

Project Director Andrew Greg, from the University of Glasgow’s Department of History of Art, said “This project has been an innovative and productive partnership between the academic world and national and regional museums across the UK. By working with the museums for three years we have been able to uncover a lot of new information on the paintings that the museums themselves often didn’t have the resources to unearth.”

“Through the richness of the information provided on the website the project addresses the lack of publicly accessible information about what is in museum collections as well as the decline of collections research in the UK.”

The research project has been awarded grants from the Getty Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Research contributing to the database has also been made possible by research grants from the Pilgrim Trust, made to 29 participating museums, and the Neil MacGregor Scholarship scheme funded by the National Gallery Trust, which supported ten scholars on the project.

The launch of the database coincides with an exciting new exhibition at the National Gallery, London, from 21 November 2007 to 10 February 2008. ‘Discoveries: New Research into British Collections’ includes revealing examples of new research uncovered by the project. The exhibition features eight paintings, spanning 500 years, from institutions across the country.

The database is available online at: http://www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP

For more information about the exhibition, visit the National Gallery website at: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/discoveries/default.htm.

For more information about the project please contact Andrew Greg, Project Director, National Inventory Research Project on 0141 330 8519 or 0141 423 7081 (a.greg@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk)”

See http://ismir2008.ismir.net/ for information on this conference to be held Sep 14-18, 2008 in Philadelphia.

 [Posted on behalf of Michael Carden of the NAA]

Please take a look at the new Xena website http://xena.sourceforge.net and download your copy, then let us know what you think.Thanks,