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Liz Lyon , of UKOLN and DCC, has produced an excellent report titled " Dealing with Data ". It is a very applied look at the issues around data curation and preservation and examines at " the roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships of institutions, data centres and other key stakeholders who work with data ." While it is UK-oriented, most of its recommendations can be applied to other regions. It includes 35 recommendations in eight categories: Co-ordination and Strategy Policy and Planning Practice Technical Integration and Interoperability Legal and Ethical Issues Sustainability Advocacy Training and Skills Many of the recommendations resonate with many of the recommendations of the National Consultation on Access to Research Data (NCASRD) here in Canada that I and others helped organize in 2005. Some recommendations of particular interest: REC 2. Research funding organisations should jointly develop a co-ordinated Data Curation and Preservation Strat...

Microsoft Open XML efforts good ? - British Library . For more problems with the OOXML "open" standard: see Slashdot's Microsoft's OOXML Formulas Could Be Dangerous and the original article by Rob Weir, The Formula for Failure . And perhaps of more significance, some real questions from FSF Europe to national standards bodies, perhaps lessons learned (or those which should be learned) from the OOXML standardization fiasco: Six Questions to national standardization bodies: Application Independence? Supporting pre-existing Open Standards? Backward compatibility for all vendors? Proprietary extensions? Dual Standards? Legally safe?

It seems that - in a BBC article (" Warning of Data Ticking Time Bomb ", discovered at the ACM TechNews for this week)- Adam Farquhar , head of e-architecture at the British Library, has made a rather disappointing comment on Microsoft and the Open XML format: Microsoft has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude. Sigh. This is very sad. The original press release from the U.K. National Archives is here: The National Archives and Microsoft join forces to preserve the UK´s digital heritage . The Wikipedia article on Open XML shows why this is such a disappointing comment. The Do you love Microsoft? blog has an excellent recent posting on this: OpenXML and the British Library - Part 4. And others also used "disappointing" for other MS related comments by Mr. Farquhar : Adam Farquhar's presentation on OOXML disappointing - CyberTech Rambler Having Your Digital Cake and Eating It - Open... And more ...

Some catching up.... I am rather behind on some posts (like I attended JCDL2007 in Vancouver last week - sans wireless - and need to post on some goings-on there...) and would like to point out some excellent work presented by a colleague of mine at CISTI : Richard Akerman 's presentation at ICSTI 2007 Nancy, titled " Web tools for web reviewers...and Everyone " and at IATUL titled " Library service-oriented architecture to enhance access to science ". [Thanks to Richard for correcting my earlier confusions....]

W3C Releases WSDL 2.0 Recommendation Today the W3C released version 2.0 of WSDL, which supports both REST-style HTTP and SOAP, and includes a converter to WSDL 2.0 .

Nature has announced what is basically a repository, Nature Preceedings - similar to arXiv.org for physics - for researchers in biology, medicine, chemistry and the Earth sciences to share early findings: " pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents ". There is no peer review, but staff curators filter-out materials that are not legitimate scientific contributions. There are also 13 subject RSS feeds. Of particular interest is how every item is given a DOI or Handler, making it more easily citable. More discussion at O'Reilly Radar and Connotea.

Sub-title : " Responsibilities of research institutions and funders, data managers, learned societies and publishers " This draft report from the Research Information Network (RIN) , UK, for consultation is a must-read for those wrestling with policies and guidelines concerned with the long-term management, access to, and archiving of digital data generated by the activities of researchers. It outlines a comprehensive policy framework, based around five principles: Roles and responsibilities Standards and quality assurance Access, usage and credit Benefits and cost effectiveness Preservation and sustainability This draft report is a follow-up to the excellent January 2007 report: Research Funders’ Policies for the management of information outputs and the June 2005 RCUK position on issue of improved access to research outputs , the latter focusing solely on research outputs as publications. Of particular interest are the reponses of the various research funding councils in...