Daisy Abbott has published "Digital Curation and Doctoral Research" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

This article considers digital curation in doctoral study and the role of the doctoral supervisor and institution in facilitating students' acquisition of digital curation skills, including some of the potentially problematic expectations of the supervisory relationship with regards to digital curation. Research took the form of an analysis of the current digital curation training landscape, focusing on doctoral study and supervision. This was followed by a survey (n=116) investigating attitudes towards importance, expertise, and responsibilities regarding digital curation. This research confirms that digital curation is considered to be very important within doctoral study but that doctoral supervisors and particularly students consider themselves to be largely unskilled at curation tasks. It provides a detailed picture of curation activity within doctoral study and identifies the areas of most concern. A detailed analysis demonstrates that most of the responsibility for curation is thought to lie with students and that institutions are perceived to have very low responsibility and that individuals tend to over-assign responsibility to themselves. Finally, the research identifies which types of support system for curation are most used and makes suggestions for ways in which students, supervisors, institutions, and others can effectively and efficiently address problematic areas and improve digital curation within doctoral study.

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Shea Swauger and Todd J. Vision have published "What Factors Influence Where Researchers Deposit their Data? A Survey of Researchers Submitting to Data Repositories" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to better understand the factors that most influence where researchers deposit their data when they have a choice, we collected survey data from researchers who deposited phylogenetic data in either the TreeBASE or Dryad data repositories. Respondents were asked to rank the relative importance of eight possible factors. We found that factors differed in importance for both TreeBASE and Dryad, and that the rankings differed subtly but significantly between TreeBASE and Dryad users. On average, TreeBASE users ranked the domain specialization of the repository highest, while Dryad users ranked as equal highest their trust in the persistence of the repository and the ease of its data submission process. Interestingly, respondents (particularly Dryad users) were strongly divided as to whether being directed to choose a particular repository by a journal policy or funding agency was among the most or least important factors. Some users reported depositing their data in multiple repositories and archiving their data voluntarily.

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Jill Lepore has published "The Cobweb," a look at the Internet Archive, in The New Yorker.

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John Durno and Jerry Trofimchuk have published "Digital Forensics on A Shoestring: A Case Study from the University of Victoria" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

While much has been written on the increasing importance of digital forensics in archival workflows, most of the literature focuses on theoretical issues or establishing best practices in the abstract. Where case studies exist, most have been written from the perspective of larger organizations with well-resourced digital forensics facilities. However organizations of any size are increasingly likely to receive donations of born-digital material on outdated media, and a need exists for more modest solutions to the problem of acquiring and preserving their contents. This case study outlines the development of a small-scale digital forensics program at the University of Victoria using inexpensive components and open source software, funded by a $2000 research grant from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).

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DuraSpace has released DSpace 5.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

With a new, modern look and feel for every device, the ability to auto-upgrade from older versions of DSpace, to batch import content and more, the release of DSpace 5 offers its far-flung global community of developers and stakeholders an even easier-to-use and more efficient institutional repository solution.

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Debra Hanken Kurtz has been named as DuraSpace's CEO.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

It brings us great pleasure to announce that the DuraSpace Board of Directors has chosen Debra Hanken Kurtz to serve as the new CEO for the Organization. Kurtz is currently the Executive Director of the Texas Digital Library. She will begin in her new role on February 16, 2015 and establish an office in Austin, Texas to manage DuraSpace business operations.

Kurtz brings key relevant experience and skills to DuraSpace. As Executive Director of the Texas Digital Library, she managed and grew membership, operations, and services. She participates in working and planning groups for DPN and SHARE. At both Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill Libraries, Kurtz provided leadership and direction for digital collections, public websites, and early planning efforts for both libraries' institutional repositories. She was an active partner within the Triangle Research Libraries Network and has been a voice for Kuali OLE, an open-source integrated library system built by and for academic and research libraries. Kurtz's complete background can be found on linkedin.

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The International Conference on Digital Preservation has released iPres 2014: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Digital Preservation.

Here's an excerpt:

Papers covered a wide array of preservation topics including migration and emulation, file format management, registries and linked data, funding models, education and training, personal archiving and software-based art, web archiving, metadata and persistent identifiers.

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The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group has released Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting.

Here's an excerpt:

The project to compare video formats for reformatting is being led by the National Archives and Records Administration with significant input from the Library of Congress. The resulting matrixes offer comparisons of the wrappers AVI, MOV (QuickTime), Matroska, MXF, and MPEG-2 (ad hoc file wrapper), and the following encodings: uncompressed (various types), lossless JPEG 2000, ffv1, and MPEG-2 (encoding). The Working Group's starting point is a useful 2011 report by George Blood for the Library of Congress titled Determining Suitable Digital Video Formats for Medium-term Storage. The inclusion of MXF means that the comparison will complement the FADGI Audio-Visual Working Group's active contributions to the finalization of the MXF AS-07 application specification for preservation and archiving, a "pre-version" of which has been adopted by the Library of Congress as their video preservation format. Nevertheless, as the finalization of AS-07 continues, members of the Working Group and others have expressed interest in evaluating alternate digital file formats. These alternate formats may be appropriate to certain classes of content, for use as interim measures, or suitable for organizations in modest technical circumstances.

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