Herbert Van de Sompel at RepoFringe 2010.
EDINA newsline
September 2010: Volume 15 Issue 3
The third Repository Fringe, organised by staff from EDINA, the ERIS project, the University of Edinburgh and the Digital Curation Centre, took place on 2–3 September at the National eScience Centre in Edinburgh.
Herbert Van de Sompel at RepoFringe 2010.
Around 90 people attended two days of excellent talks, Pecha Kucha and Round Table discussions on all things repository related.
Repository Fringe 2010 was opened by Sheila Cannell, Director of Library Services for the University of Edinburgh, who welcomed the keynote from Tony Hirst of the Open University. Tony gave an inspiring and original view of repositories, mashups and the concept of documents as databases. Later Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory spoke about the Memento project – which is enabling a form of “time travel” for the web – and, after a lively series of Round Table discussions, Dave Tarrant of University of Southampton demonstrated the new EPrints Bazaar. The first day closed with a networking session, followed by various impromptu outings to restaurants and pubs throughout the city.
On day two Chris Awre of the University of Hull spoke about the work and experiences of the Hydra project to build a flexible repository around Fedora 3.x. Round Table discussions in the late morning included Linking Articles to Research Data, Re-imagining Learning and Teaching Repositories and a meeting of the UK Metadata Forum.
Michael Fourman of the University of Edinburgh opened the afternoon with his presentation on Topic Models and related ways in which to computationally understand and organise digital text, providing another way to find items of a similar topic. Finally Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, gave the closing presentation, elegantly drawing together the themes of preceding presentations.
The Repository Fringe event was discussed via a lively Twitter hashtag (#rfringe10) and the official live blog which are both available to read and comment on (see link below). Videos and presentations have now been added to the Repository Fringe website so even those who were unable to attend should be able to get a good idea of what was shared and discussed.