Keynote Speaker
Kevin Ashley,
Director, Digital Curation Centre, UK
We are pleased to announce that Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the UK since 2010, has agreed to be the keynote speaker at IMCW2014.
Mr. Ashley has been responsible to increase the enabling capacity and capability of DCC amongst the research community in matters of digital curation, as the DCC was set up by JISC in 2004 to give practical advice and guidance to colleges and universities on digital preservation, curation and information management. His specialties are digital curation; digital preservation training; electronic record management; and hybrid archives.
Earlier, Mr. Ashley worked as the Head of Digital Archives at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) for 13 years, during which time his multi-disciplinary group has provided services related to the preservation and reusability of digital resources on behalf of other organisations, as well as conducting research, development and training. At ULCC, Dr Ashley’s group operated the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) for The National Archives of the UK for over twelve years, capturing, preserving, describing and releasing government data.
Mr Ashley was chair of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group and is currently a member of JISC’s Infrastructure and Resources committee. He is on the steering committee for the Archives Hub at MIMAS and the policy working group of the DL.ORG project. He was part of the task force that developed the RLG/NARA audit checklist for trusted digital repositories, and was a member of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation which produced the report “Invest To Save”.
Mr. Ashley holds a BSc degree in Mathematics from University College London.
Inverting the Pyramid: Maximising the Value of Data to Society
A traditional view of data sees it as a bulk item which, through a process of successive refinement, analysis and selection, leads to nuggets of wisdom, insight or knowledge. Such pyramidical representations can be seen in views from the worlds of knowledge management, research lifecycles and publishing. They assume that data is created with a particular purpose in mind and that only one analysis produces anything of lasting value. This is true for some cases, but it fails to represent the full potential of most data. I will argue, and show through example, that data’s true value is realised by enabling reuse in contexts that can be far removed from its original creation. This includes data created for administrative and other uses as well as data created for the purposes of academic or industrial research. I will also describe some of the initiatives and services around the world that are helping to realise this value in data.