Digital Scholarship has released version 3 of the Research Data Curation Bibliography. This selective bibliography includes over 230 English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions.

The "digital curation" concept is still evolving. In "Digital Curation and Trusted Repositories: Steps toward Success," Christopher A. Lee and Helen R. Tibbo define digital curation as follows:

Digital curation involves selection and appraisal by creators and archivists; evolving provision of intellectual access; redundant storage; data transformations; and, for some materials, a commitment to long-term preservation. Digital curation is stewardship that provides for the reproducibility and re-use of authentic digital data and other digital assets. Development of trustworthy and durable digital repositories; principles of sound metadata creation and capture; use of open standards for file formats and data encoding; and the promotion of information management literacy are all essential to the longevity of digital resources and the success of curation efforts.

Most sources have been published from January 2000 through June 2012; however, a limited number of earlier key sources are also included.

The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. If such versions are unavailable, italicized links to the publishers' descriptions are provided.

It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group has announced the 2013 NDSA Innovation Award winners.

Here's an excerpt:

Please join us in congratulating the 2013 Innovation Award winners:

Future Steward: Martin Gengenbach, Gates Archive. Martin is recognized for his work documenting digital forensics tools and workflows, especially his paper,"The Way We Do it Here: Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows in Collecting Institutions" and his work cataloging the DFXML schema.

Individual: Kim Schroeder, Wayne State University. Kim is recognized for her work as a mentor to future digital stewards in her role as a lecturer in Digital Preservation at Wayne State University, where she helped establish the first NDSA Student Group, supported the student-lead colloquium on digital preservation, and worked to facilitate collaboration between students in digital stewardship and local cultural heritage organizations.

Project: DataUp, California Digital Library. DataUp is recognized for creating an open-source tool uniquely built to assist individuals aiming to preserve research datasets by guiding them through the digital stewardship workflow process from dataset creation and description to the deposit of their datasets into public repositories.

Organization: Archive Team. The Archive Team , a self-described "loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage," is recognized for both for its aggressive, vital work in preserving websites and digital content slated for deletion and for its work advocating for the preservation of digital culture within the technology and computing sectors.

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The Digital Preservation Coalition has released Web Archiving.

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Web archiving technology enables the capture, preservation and reproduction of valuable content from the live web in an archival setting, so that it can be independently managed and preserved for future generations. This report introduces and discusses the key issues faced by organizations engaged in web archiving initiatives, whether they are contracting out to a third party service provider or managing the process in-house. It follows this with an overview of the main software applications and tools currently available. Selection and deployment of the most appropriate tools is contextual: organizations are advised to select the approach that best meets their business needs and drivers, and which they are able to support technically. Three case studies are included to illustrate the different operational contexts, drivers, and solutions that can be implemented.

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Heinz Pampel et al. have self-archived "Making Research Data Repositories Visible: The re3data.org Registry" in PeerJ PrePrints.

Here's an excerpt:

Researchers require infrastructures that ensure a maximum of accessibility, stability and reliability to facilitate working with and sharing of research data. Such infrastructures are being increasingly summarized under the term Research Data Repositories (RDR). The project re3data.org—Registry of Research Rata Repositories has begun to index research data repositories in 2012 and offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of the heterogeneous research data repository landscape. Information icons help researchers to easily identify an adequate repository for the storage and reuse of their data. This article describes the RDR landscape, outlines the practicality of re3data.org as a service, and shows how this service helps to find research data.

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The Australian National Data Service has released Research Data Management in Practice.

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ANDS has commissioned this "Research Data Management Practice Guide" as a practical starting point that focuses on the 'Why' and 'How' of good data and risk management, with plenty of references for further reading for readers who need more detail. . . .

The Practice Guide is aimed at research administrators in the e-research space, providing them with an overview for the planning and operations of sharing research data, thereby creating better opportunities for data re-use. It is acknowledged that no single person or even business unit is responsible for all aspects of research data management and that a collaborative approach is required. In all cases this will involve the researcher/data creator.

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Christopher J. Shaffer has published "The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise" in the latest issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship.

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Libraries have provided services to researchers for many years. Changes in technology and new publishing models provide opportunities for libraries to be more involved in the research enterprise. Within this article, the author reviews traditional library services, briefly describes the eScience and publishing landscape as it relates to libraries, and explores possible library programs in support of research. Many of the new opportunities require new partnerships, both within the institution and externally.

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The DAVID consortium has released State of the Art Report on Damage Prevention and Repair of Digital AV Media.

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This report contains information on the state of the art in digital damage prevention and repair of audio-visual media. It has been compiled in course of the project definition of DAVID. The DAVID project addresses specific research questions for preservation and restoration of audio-visual media. An overview on the projects rationale is presented in section 2, details on the continuing project can be found at www.david-preservation.eu.

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Phillip Lord and Lindsay Marshall have self-archived "Twenty-Five Shades of Greycite: Semantics for Referencing and Preservation" in arXiv.org .

Here's an excerpt:

Semantic publishing can enable richer documents with clearer, computationally interpretable properties. For this vision to become reality, however, authors must benefit from this process, so that they are incentivised to add these semantics. Moreover, the publication process that generates final content must allow and enable this semantic content. Here we focus on author-led or "grey" literature, which uses a convenient and simple publication pipeline. We describe how we have used metadata in articles to enable richer referencing of these articles and how we have customised the addition of these semantics to articles. Finally, we describe how we use the same semantics to aid in digital preservation and non-repudiability of research articles

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Archive-It has released the The Web Archiving Life Cycle Model.

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In order to address the lack of best practices and to increase awareness of the importance of web archiving as fundamental to digital preservation, the Archive-It team developed the Web Archiving Life Cycle Model (WALCM). This model is based on the team's experiences as well as lessons learned from countless partner institutions, including in-depth case studies of six of those institutions. The WALCM is an attempt to represent common workflows and create a measurable model for organizations to reference in order to create or improve their web archiving programs.

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Carolyn F. Hank has self-archived "Scholars and Their Blogs: Characteristics, Preferences, and Perceptions Impacting Digital Preservation" in the Carolina Digital Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

This descriptive study investigated scholars who blog in the areas of history, economics, law, biology, chemistry and physics, as well as attributes of their respective blogs. It offers an examination of scholars' attitudes and perceptions of their blogs in relation to the system of scholarly communication and their preferences for digital preservation.. . . Most feel their blogs should be preserved for both personal and public access and use into the indefinite, rather than short-term, future. Scholars who blog identify themselves as most responsible for blog preservation. Concerning capability, scholars perceive blog service providers, hosts, and networks as most capable. National and institutional-based libraries and archives, as well as institutional IT departments, are perceived as least responsible and capable for preservation of scholars' respective blogs.

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Dorothy Byatt, Mark Scott, F. Gareth Beale, Simon J. Cox, and Wendy White have self-archived "Developing Researcher Skills in Research Data Management: Training for the Future—A DataPool Project Report" in ePrints Soton.

Here's an excerpt:

This report will look at the multi-level approach to developing researcher skills in research data management in the University of Southampton, developed as part of the training strand of the JISC DataPool project, and embedded into the University engagement with research data management.

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Federica Bressan and Sergio Canazza have published "A Systemic Approach to the Preservation of Audio Documents: Methodology and Software Tools" in the Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents a methodology for the preservation of audio documents, the operational protocol that acts as the methodology, and an original open source software system that supports and automatizes several tasks along the process. The methodology is presented in the light of the ethical debate that has been challenging the international archival community for the last thirty years. The operational protocol reflects the methodological principles adopted by the authors, and its effectiveness is based on the results obtained in recent research projects involving some of the finest audio archives in Europe. Some recommendations are given for the rerecording process, aimed at minimizing the information loss and at quantifying the unintentional alterations introduced by the technical equipment. Finally, the paper introduces an original software system that guides and supports the preservation staff along the process, reducing the processing timing, automatizing tasks, minimizing errors, and using information hiding strategies to ease the cognitive load. Currently the software system is in use in several international archives.

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