Last week I attended the International Digital Curation Conference. It was very interesting to see many people from institutes across the world talking about how to manage and share all sorts of research data; from attempts to use institutional repository software designed for article content, to new builds from scratch, there were lots of examples.
A great value of the conference was that it was clear that people are looking for ways to make information more accessible; there is less emphasis on discussing the merits or otherwise of accessibility in itself, and more on getting it done.
Of course, all of these rely on storing data of some form or another, and also on managing metadata; a relevant area then for application of OKF tools such as CKAN and BibServer.
Further integration with services such as total-impact and figshare could also prove fruitful – although there is also risk in that there are now multiple sorts of tools that offer ways to “manage / curate / share” data that it may be unclear what they are all for – what is their USP, and why should we use X over Y? This is a question for CKAN and BibServer to answer as much as any of the alternatives.
