Access Day 2 - Afternoon Sessions #1

Dorothea Salo absolutely rocked the gym with her presentation - not an easy gig directly after lunch. Dorothea talked about data repositories and curation and gave the best presentation I have heard for a long time. The Cassandra of Repositories (not her association) kicked it up because she knows and reminds us that the current IR landscape is broken and is not afraid to say why (hence the Cassandra reference). She highlighted some of the challenges and issues:

• Data are there to be interacted with
• Data have different affordances
• Data and their technical environments are widely divergent in nature
• Data are part of Projects
• Data are messy and not standardized
• There is no magic pixie dust for digital repositories
• Our data buckets and processes are not Taylorist processes and require complex solutions
• We need to provide the ability to re-contextualize data in repositories, rather than build and encourage project silos.

Great session - watch the stream, as the experience of listening to Dorothea is the only way to appreciate the full message.