Another Round of Highlights

It has now been a month since we gathered in Edinburgh for Open Repositories 2012 and we are delighted to report that there has been plenty of new content and reflection about the conference appearing since then.

Well over 90 blog posts and reports on the conference are now out there – you have been absolutely brilliant over the last few weeks sharing your reports, reflections and thoughts on how to take forward the fantastic ideas shared by speakers, posters, fellow delegates. We are sure there are more posts to come (since it has taken us a while to update this blog and we’re sure we’re not the only ones still thinking about talks, ideas, discussions had) so do let us know as you add any reports or write ups of your own. For now here are a few more highlights we wanted to share while everything is still fairly fresh – look at the bottom of this post for links to a more thorough collection of posts.

Firstly we have noticed lots of you sharing links to your slides on SlideShare. We will be making sure all of the programme content, slides and videos are connected up here on the website but for now we are making sure we gather these links to your shared presentations. For instance Todd Grappone and Sharon Farb at UCLA have shared their slides on the broadcast news archival work. This ambitious project is one to keep an eye out for, especially when it opens to the public in the future.

Research data has featured prominently in many of your write ups as it was a major theme of this year’s Open Repositories:

Leyla Williams blogged up a summary on the conference for the Center For Digital Research and Scholarship, with particular attention paid to research data and public access to hives of content.

Meanwhile Leslie Johnston of the Library of Congress gave a talk on big data, and also wrote up a great post on the significance of data in a repository setting where publications were once the center focus.

Tyrannosaurus and Shark in National Museum

Some people say open access policy has no teeth… (‘OR2012 012′ by wr_or2012, 22-07-12)

In addition to delegates and attendees who have been sharing their experiences some of our workshop facilitators have been sharing rich reflections on their workshops. For example Angus Whyte of the Digital Curation Centre further developed the idea of research data in repositories, and wrote up the conference workshop on the subject

Most of you will have seen some of the Developer Challenge Show & Tell sessions and we are delighted that the DevCSI team have shared their videos of OR2012 and they are a great collection of Developer Challenge presentations and short interview recordings, like this clip of Peter Sefton, chair of the judges:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We are also starting to see some really interesting posts about how OR2012 ideas and talks can be operationalised. For instance Simon Hodson of JISC has posted a whole series of excellent OR2012 write ups and reflections at the JISC Managing Research Data blog.

And we have also started to see publications based on the conference appearing.  Steph Taylor has written about OR2012 for Ariadne (Issue 69) as an example to frame her advice from getting the most from a conference – it’s a super article and should prove handy for planning your trip to OR2013 on Prince Edward Island. OR2012 has also featured very prominently in the latest issue of Digital Repository Federation Monthly, which includes 10 Japanese attendees’ reports of the conference – huge thanks to @nish_ku for bringing this to our attention.

The Digital Repository Federation article is far from the only non-English write up we’ve had – so far we have spotted write ups of the conference in German, Finnish, Polish, more posts in Japanese and this fantastic series of images of the conference dinner from the Czech KlíštÄ›cí Å¡uplátko photo blog. We know our language skills can’t match up to the incredible diversity of languages spoken by OR2012 delegates so we would really you to let us know if we’ve missed any of the write ups, reports, or reflections shared, particularly if they have been shared in another language.

As we have shared a number of write ups that draw on major conference themes it seems appropriate to close this post with the video of Peter Burnhill of EDINA delivering the closing session this year and wrapping everything up. It’s worth re-watching and, like all of the OR2012 videos, you can watch, share and comment on this on YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And finally….

We have several OR2012 conference bags left to give away. These are the perfect size for a laptop and papers which makes them fantastic for meetings but they are also great for looking stylish and well-travelled around the office or for transporting your craft kit to coffee shops and meet ups. We will be posting these remaining bags out with a few bonus edible Scottish treats so make sure you comment here or tweet with #or2012bags quickly to make sure you secure one of our last three remaining bags!

Where to find even more highlights…

  • Images can be found on Flickr, Highlights are gathered on our Pinterest board.
  • We have several gatherings of useful links which you can find on Delicious: write ups (blog posts, reports, etc.) of OR2012, useful resources shared in presentations and via Twitter, and OR2012 presentations.
  • Videos are on YouTube.
  • We have gathered tweets with Storify for browsing and exploring (please note this archive is updated once a week).
  • If you want to analyse or browse the text of all tweets you can access the full spreadsheet containing thousands of #OR2012 tweets on Google Docs. Please ignore colour codings – these are being used to remove unwanted content (tweets intended for other hashtags) and to ensure we capture all links to useful resources shared.

Highlights (so far)

OR2012 has wrapped up, tweets are now just slowly fluttering in, and blog posts are popping up like new database entries in springtime. We wanted to gather together a sampling of the best stuff we’ve come across since last week and put it all in plain sight. We know you guys eat broken links and buried content for breakfast, but we figured this could be your pre-meal cup of coffee. …or something. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got.

Keita Bando was active throughout the conference. Here's a shot taken at the drinks and poster session. Click through to see the rest of Keita's lovely photos

Natasha Simons was one of our volunteer bloggers, and she did a fantastic job of it. Mixing summary, analysis, and flair into each post makes each and every one a pleasure to read. Here’s one on arriving in Edinburgh and hearing about the ‘Building a National Network’ workshop, one on conference day 2 (and haggis balls), and one with a sporran full of identifiers chat.

Rob Hilliker immortalized some of the software archiving workshop whiteboard notes for us. Linked to his Twitter post, which leads to a few more pictures and his epic stream of OR2012 tweets

Nick Sheppard, another of our volunteer bloggers, wrote up his reflections of the first two days of the conference on the train ride home. He was keen to write it, and you should be keen to read it. Trust us.

Owen Stephens put together some notes and commentary on repository services, and especially on ResourceSync for folks that are into that sort of thing.

We’re also pleased that discussing the Anthologizr project inspired an Edinburgh University MSc student to focus on that work for his e-Learning dissertation.

An amazing bit of #OR2012 activity analytics by Martin Hawkseye using Carrot2. Click through for full details on how it was made.

The JISC MRD folks took superb notes about the session on institutional perspectives in research data management and infrastructure.

Brian Kelly weighed in on Cameron Neylon’s opening plenary and the significance of connectedness, with particular focus on social media platforms. His site is always worth a browse, so keep tabs on it. View the plenary below.

The DevCSI developer challenge was quite a lively segment of the conference, no matter which side of the mic you were on. Stuart Lewis drummed up excitement about the collaboration between developers and managers that the challenge aimed for this year, and the result was more than we could hope for. The number of submissions was higher than ever. Check out the competition show and tell and read about the winners.

A mockup of Clang! It was the runner-up project in the DevCSI developer challenge. Click through for a post about the idea

That’s what we’ve gathered so far, but it isn’t enough to do you all justice. That’s why we want you to comment, write in, tweet, and photograph everything you think we missed. We need slide decks, papers, pictures, and everything else. Speakers, if you haven’t passed on slides to session chairs, don’t be shy. And everybody else, drop us a line. We’ll be sure to include whatever you’ve got.

"Coder we can believe in." Click through for Adam Field's first tweet of the image

All this work isn’t just for the website. Everything we gather up will be going into a repository of open repository conference content. What can we say, we’re pretty single-minded when it comes to keeping it all open access for you lot. Get sending, and we’ll share more soon.