Conference Theme

Twenty years back, twenty years forward: lessons and directions in digital curation

The first International Digital Curation Conference took place in 2005, one year after the launch of the Digital Curation Centre. The tenth IDCC took place in 2015, one year before the publication of the FAIR principles. 

The Call for Proposals in 2015 encouraged submissions taking a decade-long view of the past, present or future. IDCC25 consciously revisits that call with a similar emphasis on building on what we have learned and recommendations on how to progress, but this time with a generational perspective on digital curation. 

Although they need not be over a 20-year period, contributors are invited to reflect on the changes in different areas, consider ongoing developments, and think about emerging challenges for the next generation of digital curation work. 

Curation infrastructure 

Proposals that describe institutional, consortia-level, national or international infrastructure supporting digital curation and research data management: 

• Tools, systems and services that are in development 
• Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation 
• Proposals for new approaches to large-scale service delivery 
• Innovative research and exploration into new curation methods 
• Movements in Open and Citizen Science and trust in digital curation 

Education and training 

Proposals that explore education and training needs of data curators, researchers (in Research Data Management), or supporting staff: 

• What knowledge and skills are needed? 
• How effective is current training in delivering knowledge and skills? 
• What are established best practices in educating and training these groups? 
• What innovations are being explored? 
• What skills do curators, researchers and support staff need now, and what will they need in the future? 

Sustainability and strategy 

Proposals considering how digital curation and Research Data Management activities can be sustained and developed over the medium to long term: 

• Analyses of the costs and benefits of curation 
• Work on curation processes, techniques, costs, and workflows 
• AI for data re-use -- automated data collection, cleaning, analysis, and visualisation 
• Environmental sustainability of digital curation 
• Discarding data: when and how it is de-acquisitioned 

Working with challenging data 

Proposals discussing work with particularly challenging or specialist forms of data: 

• Data on a large scale: big data or large collections of long-tail data 
• Complex data, models and formats 
• Sensitive data, retrieval and secure curation 
• Universal standards and expectations and that of context and discipline specific adaptations 

Sharing data 

Proposals that tackle issues associated with making data visible to, accessible to and usable by others: 

• Demonstrating research integrity 
• Measuring the impact and reuse of data by traditional or alternative metrics 
• Data sovereignty and bringing data back to communities 

Legal and ethical issues 

Proposals considering legal and ethical issues, including: 

• Privacy 
• Sharing health and sharing genomic data 
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning 
• Trusting individuals to have power over their own data and its (re)use 
• Intellectual Property Rights, legal and policy issues around AI training data collection and use