This year, the 11th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC16) was held at the Mövenpick Hotel in Amsterdam. While the main events for the conference took place on Tuesday, February 23rd and Wednesday, February 24th, IDCC16 also offered several cost-associated as well as free of charge workshops on Monday, February 22nd and Thursday, February 25th. The full conference program can be accessed and viewed via the following link: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc16/programme-presentations
Before IDCC16, I had also attended the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in 2014 and 2015. Although I have only attended two other past IDCCs, my experience with IDCC has always been very positive. Particularly, IDCC is well organized and usually includes a variety of activities, such as keynote speakers, special topic panelists, paper presentations, poster sessions, and workshops. Additionally, IDCC attendees often represented different international organizations with diverse experience levels and expertise. As a result, IDCC is a very productive and helpful venue for me to learn from different perspectives regarding both current and upcoming development in digital curation as well as to connect with other curation professionals.
Compared to the previous IDCCs, IDCC16 again offered a wide range of activities like the past conferences. However, I noticed that there was an increase in number of paper types (research, practice, as well as data papers), live demonstrations, and “Birds of a Feather” sessions. The “Birds of a Feather” sessions were especially interesting to me because they provided the attendees with the opportunities to interact with each other regarding specific topics of concern. During the discussions that took place in these sessions, additional areas to investigate or potential solutions were often suggested and formulated by the attendees who might decide to work together further. These sessions explore and promote opportunities to collaborate, which remind me of the ESIP Community, and is the main reason that I enjoy participating in these sessions.
Since there were so many activities that took place during IDCC16, it is difficult to provide one summary or even several highlights for the conference. However, during the “Summing Up” keynote speech on the last day of the conference, Mr. Clifford Lynch, the Executive Director of Coalition for Networked Information, provided the following four questions for the attendees to reflect on. These questions are very insightful, so I thought I can share the questions here for the ESIP Community to review as well.
- If we consider “reuse” instead of “sharing” as the key objective, how would some of the curation practices/areas that are currently being focused on evolve or be changed?
- How could we transition to involve additional expertise, so that curation is more of a shared responsibility?
- Instead of “curation”, which often refers more to a set of specific tasks, is it more appropriate to use the word “stewardship” to reflect the long term commitment that is needed?
- In addition to published journals, how could scholarly communication be conducted and manifested in order to continue to establish and support Open Research, including Open Science?
As for my own contributions to the conference, I had presented posters for the past two years, and this year, I was very excited that I was able to present both a poster and a peer-reviewed practice paper. The poster was entitled “Growing the Next Generation Data Management Experts: Survey of Data Management Training Modules” (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/IDCC16/1_DMTSurvey.pdf) and was based on the Data Management Training Resources Survey project that I performed for the Data Stewardship Committee during fall 2015. For the paper, the title was “Formalizing an Attribution Framework for Scientific Data/Software Products & Collections” (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/IDCC16/Parallel%20C/Session%202/Chung%20yi-hou.pdf). Through the paper, I shared the results of a project that I worked on with Dr. Matthew Mayernik of the Library at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who is also a member of the ESIP Data Stewardship Committee and my advisor for the poster, regarding a potential attribution and acknowledgement framework that could be used to document contribution information for scientific projects and products. Both presentations, especially the poster, received feedback and interests from the conference attendees to learn more about the respective projects. I am looking forward to establishing contacts with these attendees and inviting them to get involved with the ESIP Data Stewardship Committee and the ESIP Community as a whole.