Digital Curation Centre (DCC)
The creation of a Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was a key recommendation in the JISC Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Strategy, which argued for the establishment of a national centre for solving challenges in digital curation that could not be tackled by any single institution or discipline. Its remit would also include the provision of generic services, some development activity and research.
The DCC was launched on 1st March 2004 as a consortium comprising the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow (which together host the National e-Science Centre), UKOLN at the University of Bath, and STFC, which managed the Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury Laboratories.
During Phase 1 (3/04–2/07) and Phase 2 (3/07–2/10), the DCC had a target group defined as those engaging in digital preservation and curation activities within UK Higher and Further Education. This group was seen to include data specialists, records managers, librarians, archivists, researchers (as data creators), and policy-makers.
The DCC also sought to engage in project activity with the public and commercial sectors, international ‘sister organisations’ and standards working groups, recognising that the advancement of tools and processes for digital curation depends on developments that take place beyond the UKHE/FE sector as well as within it. During Phase 2, the emphasis of DCC activity was on a direct involvement with the active research community, as exemplified by the creation of an e-Science Liaison function and the conduct of immersive discipline case studies by the SCARP project.
Phase 3 (3/10–2/13) has brought the introduction of structural changes, with a shift away from the development of curation tools and a renewed focus on building capacity, capability and skills for data curation across the UK’s higher education research community. The DCC Phase 3 team, with its core at the University of Edinburgh and its partners at UKOLN (University of Bath) and HATII (University of Glasgow), now concentrates on the provision of expertly mediated access to resources, originating both from the DCC and elsewhere; an advocacy and community development programme designed to produce a nationally coherent movement for change; all underpinned by a training programme aimed at nurturing the transfer of knowledge and best practice between data producers, users and custodians. A document establishing phase 3 is attached below.
This new emphasis has exposed a critical dependency upon the contribution of a network of practitioners beyond the core DCC, who will be crucial to the exponential growth of effective data curation practice. During Phases 1 and 2 of the DCC, research and development were key funded activities and their R&D teams worked passionately to transform research-led innovation into services that would enhance the productivity of digital curation practice. Their Publications page provides documents that were produced. In Phase 3 their core funding no longer supports research but they are actively seeking other funded opportunities for researching solutions to issues that we have identified as important to digital curation. These include data transformation and integration, context and emulation, ontologies, provenance, security and data registries.
Within their compass as a provider of trusted resources they continue to monitor and evaluate international standards, produce recommendations for tools and methods, and support audit and certification processes for trusted repositories. Their resources pages provide more information on this. Much of the research and development in digital curation requires supporting database and XML technology, and from their HQ in Edinburgh they maintain close links with the Edinburgh University Database Group with whom they have collaborated on the topics listed here.
