VCC3Proposal

Organisation of the tasks

Sophie David, Jean-Luc Minel

28th-29th August 2012, Dublin

Plan of the presentation

• Some remaining problems after Utrecht• Proposal

– Positive motivations– Tasks

• Discussion

Some remaining problems after Utrecht:Curation

• This task covers both a task concerning curation and another “possible” task concerning long-term preservation.

• No reference to disciplinary dimensions (the curation process for archaeology and literature is not very likely the same one)

Some remaining problems after Utrecht:

Digital repository support• In our current description, it is linked to

the curation task (including long-term preservation aspects). It is rather difficult to understand why it is a specific task: not a broad perimeter compared to other tasks.

• It is also strongly linked to VCC1. More specifications are required.

Some remaining problems after Utrecht: Enrich digital scholar

contents• The description only mentions enrichment

through metadata from scientific lists of reference, which is too restrictive.

• Enrichment can consist of:– linking primary sources to publications– linking a reference in a footnote to the

publication– adding metadata– adding categorical information– adding lemmatisation information– adding information through annotation

systems (including collaborative ones)– etc.

Some remaining problems after Utrecht:

In a nutshell…• The general picture of the VCC3: not

sufficiently clear.• The description and denomination of the

tasks are still too heterogeneous:– Different perimeters (ex.: curation versus

digital repository support); – At least, one task is missing: digital

publications– Task denominations focus on the types of

objects (reference data registries), on the types of digital activities (curation, enrichment), on the type of deliverables (support, guidelines to good practices).

Proposal: Positive motivations

• An organisational mode which takes explicitly the whole research cycle into account

1. Conceptualisation of the research cycle in A&H is explicitly cited and discussed in PP Dariah reports:Unsworth 2000, Palmer 2009• 5 activities have been first identified: Searching,

Collecting, Reading, Writing, and Collaborating, and then confronted to the processes involved in DH

• 5 processes have been retained: Search and discovery, Gather, Analyse and experiment, Publish and disseminate, Store and archive

Proposal: Positive motivations

2. The beginning of the VCC3 description:“The scholarly content management VCC will deal

with the various stages of the scholarly content life cycle, from creation, curation, and dissemination, through to the pooling of scholarly digital resources and results for reuse […]”

3. Homogeneous task denominations, based on scientific research

4. Easier to add new (sub)tasks5. Easier for DH actors to understand an

organisational mode based on the research cycle.

Proposal: General points

• The VCC3 could comprise 6 tasks:1.Coordination and Management2.Best practices and open access3.Digitization ?? (cf. ~ gather)4.Analysis and experimentation (cf. analyse and

experiment)5.Publishing and dissemination (cf. publish and

disseminate)6.Storage and long-term preservation (cf. store

and archive)

Discussion

• To take the research cycle into account for the organisation of the work

• To agree on the list of the tasks, the name of the tasks, the possible subtasks

• For each task, to specify:– Responsibilities ‒ Description– Stakeholders ‒ Organisation of the working group(s)– List of deliverables/services (inventory, reference

documentation, guidelines, helpdesk(s), others?)

• To specify our strategic targets• To specify how tools, platforms, and services are

Dariah-compatible and/or labelled by Dariah and/or validated by the VCC1:– Single-sign-on compatible. Be open source coded. Have

standardized and interoperable formats. Others? For the first year, for the following years…