da blog

The Winter 2008 issue of Datasets News, the NDAD newsletter is now available. The issue features articles by three of NDAD’s archivists on subjects as diverse as the sport of fencing, English Heritage’s Record of Scheduled Monuments dataset, and a report on a seminar on the importance of long-term datasets in ecological science.

The first article is a lighthearted attempt to find out whether the NDAD archive contains any information about my own hobby, the sport of fencing and investigates the nature of fencing related injuries recorded in the Home and Leisure Accident Surveillance System dataset. In the second article Ed Pinsent investigates the research potential of the Record of Scheduled Monuments (RSM), his article includes an extremely helpful step-by-step approach to assisting users in searching/extracting the best from this dataset. Finally, Joanne Anthony presents a report on a Linnean Society seminar entitled “The Longer, The Better” which highlighted the crucial value of long-term datasets for ecological science and was held as part of the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Robert Marsham, FRS (father of British phenology).

To Westminster yesterday for the Gov 2.0 event organised by OII and POST, held at Portcullis House. (I’d love to have taken my own photos to include, but everywhere I turned there were “No photography” signs, and you know how I hate to break rules.)

The event was in two parts: on reflection I could happily have skipped the first session, in which several erudite professors raked over the well-trodden ashes of government IT disasters. All a bit superficial, really, and little, if anything, that wasn’t just as true 10 or 20 years ago, or that you won’t hear about on any decent project management course. But some of it may still have been news to the Whitehall and BCS elite present.

What I came for really was the second-half, chaired by the charming Earl of Erroll, and which seemed to be where the real meat of “Gov 2.0″ lay.

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I’m writing this shortly after realising that I left it too late to book a place at the 3rd International Digital Curation Conference in Washington DC. The two previous events, in Bath and Glasgow, were excellent in every respect: well organised, a diverse range of papers from a variety of perspectives, and stimulating discussion. I got a taste of what this year’s conference will offer since I was lucky enough to be part of the review panel for papers submitted to the conference. Two have stuck in my mind as having particular relevance for us: Read the rest of this entry »

We were pleased to receive confirmation yesterday from The National Archives that ULCC Digital Archives has been selected to provide the Datasets@TNA service from February 2008. This is the next generation of the NDAD service which we began developing in 1997, and will run for three to five years, with the service moving in house to TNA at the end of the contract as their Seamless Flow project for managing all digital government records comes online. It’s going to mean a different way of working to some extent – moving from a service developed in the spirit of the Private Finance Initiative to one in which our role is to transfer expertise and knowledge to TNA (as well as continuing to provide a service to government departments and the public.)