The past decade has witnessed a rush to create digital content in the not-for-profit sector but despite the great value of the content being entrusted to a digital format, the business models that will ensure long-term access to and preservation of this material are still unclear. In this session, Caroline Kimbell from the The National … Read more
This session offered a perspective on active efforts to incorporate new media into learning at universities and colleges with a more traditional outlook. It also demonstrated that with the growth of distance learning, new media platforms can engage and connect students. Read more
As the speakers at this seminar demonstrated, there are clear benefits to crowd sourcing and engaging with the community outside university walls. There are excellent (and frequently unexpected) research results. Engaging with the community helps promote university work to a wider public. There are also considerable profile and prestige benefits. On a more personal level, … Read more
Jackie Knowles provided a lunchtime demonstration of The Welsh Repository Network. Thanks to this collaborative venture, every university in Wales now has a repository – making it one of the first countries in the world to have complete national coverage. Read more
How much does it cost to manage/curate research data? What are the benefits of national data centres? How can we make digital preservation economically sustainable? How can we support university projects? All these questions and more were considered in this panel session, which looked at the complex challenges of good research data management. Surprisingly, it … Read more
The climate change debate just got even hotter. NASA announced today that this year’s January, February, and March were the hottest on record; last year was the second warmest ever based on ocean temperature; and if we continue as we are, there will be an average of a six degree increase by the time the … Read more
This interactive panel question and answer session on employer relationships began with a quick overview of projects run by the four panel members, and then branched out into wide-ranging discussions. It looked at how both academics and businesses could be encouraged to engage with each other, and how technology could be used to build those … Read more
From this month, every university in the UK will have to keep accurate records of how green they are as part of a mandatory climate change and energy saving scheme (for more info see www.decc.gov.uk/crc). With energy bills of £116 million, and carbon emissions of 275,000 tonnes across higher education in 2009, there’s never been … Read more
When was the last time you plugged in a kettle and wondered if it had enough electricity to make you a cup of coffee? Yet when working on computation-intensive projects, the issue of having enough computing resources for the project is always a concern. The UK National Grid Service (NGS) aims to end that concern … Read more
The challenge: take 20,000 historical images of China, add as much information to them as possible, then create a new Web 2.0-enabled site that enables staff and students to use those images in their work. Simon Price and researchers at the University of Bristol are meeting that challenge right now, thanks to a JISC-funded piece … Read more