RLUK DSF: Repositories - Reflections on Repository Infrastructure
Wed 13 Mar 2024 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM GMT
Online, Zoom
Description
RLUK’s Digital Shift Forum brings together colleagues from across the information, research, cultural and heritage communities, and third and commercial sectors, to discuss the future of the digital shift in collections, services, and audiences.
The series aims to promote cross-sector discussion and debate, to enable knowledge exchange, and inspire collaborative endeavour across sectors and communities, for the benefit of RLUK members and the wider research and information management communities.
RLUK's Digital Shift Forum events are free to attend and open to all.
Repositories: Reflections on Repository Infrastructure
Wednesday 13 March 2024, 14:00 – 16:00 (GMT), 15:00 – 17:00 (CET), 16:00 – 18:00 (EET/SAST), 10:00 – 12:00 (EDT), 07:00 -09:00 (PDT), 22:00 – 00:00 (AWST/CST)
This joint RLUK and Open Repositories event will provide an opportunity to share reflections on our repository infrastructure. The first talk will be delivered by Prof Hussein Suleman whose research is situated within the Digital Libraries Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. Professor Suleman gave the closing keynote at Open Repositories 2023. His talk will inspire and challenge us - and encourage us to think broadly about the ways repositories enable discoverability and interoperability of information and data within the structured web of data.
The second talk will be from Stefano Cossu, Harvard University. Stefano will share key takeaways and updates on Harvard’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) Futures Project. The DRS has provided digital preservation and access to Harvard’s library and archival collections for 22 years. The once cutting-edge technology supporting this service has gradually aged and is due for a redesign. In approaching this major institutional challenge, which affects over 60 Harvard departments and uncountable external users of their data, Harvard have taken an innovative approach not only in the technology or production practices, but also in the modes of collaboration, information gathering and audience targeting.
Earlier versions of these talks were presented at Open Repositories 2023, in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
The session will be chaired by Torsten Reimer, University Librarian and Dean of the University Library at the University of Chicago. Torsten is the current chair of the Open Repositories Steering Committee.
Professor Hussein Suleman is the Dean of Science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His research is situated within the Digital Libraries Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, with a focus on digital libraries, ICT4D, African language Information Retrieval, cultural heritage preservation, Internet technology and educational technology. He has in the past worked extensively on architecture, scalability and interoperability issues related to digital library systems. He has worked closely with international and national partnerships for metadata archiving, including: the Open Archives Initiative; Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations; and the NRF-CHELSA South African National ETD Project. His recent research has a growing emphasis on the relationship between low resource environments and digital library architectures. This has evolved into a focus on societal development and its alignment with digital libraries and information retrieval. He is currently collaborating with various colleagues in digital humanities groups to develop a proof-of-concept and experimental low-resource software toolkit for digital repositories; this reconceptualision of the architecture of digital repositories will arguably lower the bar for adoption and reduce the risk of data loss for archivists in low-resource environments.
Stefano Cossu joined Harvard in 2022 as the Digital Repository Architect for DRS Futures, a task force in charge of re-imagining and re-engineering the University Library's digital preservation system. Before his current role, Stefano worked as a Software Architect at the
Getty Trust and as Director of Application Services, Collections at the Art Institute of Chicago. In all these roles Stefano has researched and promoted community-supported technology, sustainability practices, and a focus on cultural heritage and academic challenges in IT. Stefano has been an active participant in communities such as IIIF, Fedora, Samvera, and OCFL at the technical, community, and strategic level for over 10 years.
Dr. Torsten Reimer is University Librarian and Dean of the University Library at the University of Chicago. With a background in digital scholarship and research infrastructures, Torsten’s career is focused on making the global knowledge environment more open.
Joining details
This event will be held as a Zoom webinar. Attendees will be sent a joining link the day before the event and should ensure their email is entered correctly in the registration form. Attendees should check junk folders if no joining email is received.