The 2013 editions of the international conferences on Dublin Core (DC-2013) and Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES-2013) have taken off on Tuesday, September 3, and will close on Thursday, September 5. The conferences are collocated in order for metadata and preservation experts to meet, since - to quote the keynote speaker Gildas Illien of the National Library of France:

 

"they love the same things, only from different angles, metadata and preservation experts are doomed to unify their forces to make the reception successful. For what's the point of preserving documents you can't access, of describing documents which risk vanishing tomorrow?"(Keynote: Darling we need to talk)

Tutorials

The DC Conference was preceded on Monday, September 2, by a pre-conference dedicated to the following tutorials:  

• Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C: Introduction to Linked Open Data (LOD).
• Steven Miller, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies: Introduction to Ontology Concepts and Terminology
• Kai Eckert, research associate at the Chair of Chris Bizer, University of Mannheim, Metadata Provenance
• Daniel Garijo, Ph.D. student in the Ontology Engineering Group at the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Computer Science Faculty of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: The W3C Provenance Ontology

iPRES - Day 1

The iPRES sessions covered a wide range of topics, from web archives to sharing Knowledge, object preservation and repositories. The proceedings are available both in an open access publication from the Digital Library of the National Library of Portugal (NLP) and as a free e-book from the NLP Online Bookshop.

Highlighted

CLEAR: a credible method to evaluate website archivability

Presented by Vangelis Banos of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. 

"Web archiving is crucial to ensure that cultural, scientic and social heritage on the web remains accessible and usable over time. A key aspect of the web archiving process is optimal data extraction from target websites. This procedure is difficult for such reasons as, website complexity, plethora of underlying technologies and ultimately the open-ended nature of the web "(taken from the Abstract).

In this context Banos presented Credible Live Evaluation of Archive Readiness (CLEAR), a method to measure the Website Archivability (WA) of websites.

CLEAR measures the WA of a website from the following perspectives/facets: Accesibility, Standards Compliance, Cohesion, Metadata Usage, Performance. To demonstrate the viability of the method, a prototype application has been established: archiveready.com. This application analyzes the WA of any given webiste based on the above mentioned 5 facets. Although the tool currently evaluates a single website page of a website, it gives a good indication of the WA of the whole website, based on the assumption that all its pages share same components and standards. 

To check the WA of your own website, go to ArchiveReady and enter the address. It is a valuable tool for as well web archivists as web designers!

The project received funding from the European Commission Framework Programme 7(FP7), BlogForever project

DC-2013: Day 1

The first day contained sessions on Linked Data and Research Data, a special session on Vocabulary Preservation and was closed by a Posters session. All DC papers are available online at the Presentations page of the DC website.

Highlighted 

Integration of research data and research data links into library catalogs

Presented by Dominique Ritze of the University of Manheim.