Sunday 10 June 2007

Press release: JISC Conference on Digital Repositories

From JISC repositories discussion list:

Excerpts from a summary of the JISC Conference on Digital Repositories held in Manchester 6 June 2007:

'A major conference on digital repositories took place this week in
Manchester, attracting nearly 200 delegates from around the UK...

'Rachel Bruce, JISC programme director [said that] JISC's Digital
Repositories programme... had given significant impetus to repository
development in the UK...

'Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation gave the first keynote
presentation on the "Repositories Roadmap"... The vision for
2010... is increasingly "not if, but when" newly published scholarly
outputs [are] made... open access. The situation now might therefore
require us to set a more ambitious target than that of a "high
percentage"... the Web['s] role as a means of discovery and access
need[s] to be emphasised more... [C]onceptualising repositories as
websites forces us to "think about their usability, their information
architectures and their accessibility."

'Dr Keith Jeffrey of the Science and Technology Facilities Council
gave the second keynote address. The benefits of open access
repositories, he claimed, include faster "research turnaround",
improved quality for the originators of research as colleagues were
able review the research more easily, as well as improved quality for
the community in general. They also support innovation, he continued,
improve education and public engagement with science and research
and enhance an institution's standing.'

Further details of the conference, including presentations, will be available shortly.

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