The Digital Curation Centre: Entrusted with the Task
Peter Burnhill's Speech for the
Launch of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC)
Edinburgh, 5 November 2004
Honoured Guests, Friends and Colleagues. May I add my welcome and thank
you for travelling to be here today at the launch of the Digital Curation Centre.
There is opportunity later this morning to speak about the Centre and to set
out our agenda. Now, I wish to record thanks to the JISC and e-Science
Programme for investing trust, and funding, in the DCC, to carry out what we
regard as a set of tasks of the utmost importance. These are the best of tasks
- not a trivial problem in sight!
Digital Curation is a new term, barely older than the Centre which is being
launched today. Yet it brings together concerns about longevity - digital
preservation - and added value activities - data curation. Digital curation is
intrinsically linked with the advances in Information & Communication
Technologies that have taken place over the lifetime of us here: the
computing and digital age. Indeed, digital curation is very much about
communication over time.
Technological change has provided radically new opportunities for scholarly
understanding and scientific advance, and has provided huge economies,
creating wealth through re-use and transformation of digital objects and
transactions via Internet communication reducing limitations of geographic
boundaries.
But that technological change is careless with the information and data that
we require, as evidence and record, repeatedly threatening a form of global
environmental change: that of the IT environment in which we encode digital
information. We must devise new techniques and procedures of
communication, ones that allow us to ensure communication not just across
geography but across time.
I would like to record three sets of thanks. The first to colleagues from across
the four partner institutions that have come together to make an organisation
of real talent to take forward the mission of the DCC. Next, local thanks to all
staff at NeSC, Informatics and EDINA, and all the many others, for their
contributions to the set-up of the DCC, and to this launch activity. Third, a
personal note of thanks to Robin Rice for intelligently moving things forward
with mix of grace and determination in her role as Phase One project coordinator.
It is a mark of the importance of digital curation that this initiative brings
together the document and computing tradition, universities and research
councils, academy and industry, all with international dimension. On behalf of
all Digital Curation Centre staff, I would like especially to thank our peers, our
colleagues in research units, data centres, archives and libraries for being
here today. We must succeed, and that success will only be possible if we all
collaborate in this venture.
We must all be digital curators now.
Peter Burnhill
Director (Phase One)
5 November 2004