New challenges for digital scholarship and digital curation in the era of ubiquitous computing - slidecast
764 days ago
New challenges for digital scholarship and digital curation in the era of ubiquitous computing and knowledge networks
Derek Keats, Deputy Vice Chancellor – Knowledge and Information Management, The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
derek.keats@wits.ac.za
ABSTRACT
Established aspects of digital scholarship and digital curation take place within the boundaries of institutions, with key areas contained in these concepts being the digitisation of existing library resources, the capturing of academic papers in preprint or post-print form into digital repositories, the capturing of theses and dissertations into ETD (electronic thesis and dissertation) systems, the digitisation, archiving and preservation of historical materials in a variety of source formats. More recently, this has included the capturing, archiving and preservation of research data, and mining this information and raw data as a new form of research. Much of this has been carried out on a personal computer, with the products being stored on a single physical web server with a database connection, and it was accessed by a web browser running on a personal computer. Recent developments in hardware devices and software, including the proliferation of mobile computing devices, the advent of cloud and grid computing, various free and open licenses, open APIs (application programming interfaces), and more importantly - emerging new patterns of behaviour - are creating challenges for this still relatively new discipline. Digital scholarship also includes the location and organisation of research output relevant to one's own research, including digital reprint collections and citation databases that may be used in writing papers. In this area in particular, academic users are taking ownership of aspects of digital scholarship that would have traditionally been handled by libraries. The presentation discusses these challenges, and some of the opportunities they contain. In particular, there is a focus on opportunities for collaboration and synergy that exist within South African higher education institutions.
4th African Digital Scholarship and Curation Conference (see: http://www.nedicc.ac.za/test/Programme.aspx), 16 2011 at the CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria
Audio only:
digital scholarship digital curation ubiquitous computing library
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