ECDL2007 Workshop

We held a workshop in conjunction with this year’s ECDL conference (workshop home page http://tinyurl.com/27jses ). I’ll return to some of the presentations and outcomes of the workshop in another post but, in summary, the workshop went really well. The participants understood the ideas being presented and I think that everyone (whether or not they agreed with the ideas presented) had a thought-provoking day. Thank you to all of the speakers and other participants.

There were some useful critiques of particular aspects of the approach, including: a concern that the distinctions between entities and species were unclear (particularly when mentally translated into other languages); an observation that the approach could complement (rather than conflict) with newer approaches to the development of architectures; and a call to provide some more structured guidance about how to represent ecological views or models.

The workshop affirmed that there is something in this approach and it’s emphasis on articulating messy particularity that isn’t currently being covered by other efforts. It reinforced our feeling that this is more of a communication, planning, and management approach than a more formal (mathematical/systems) modeling approach.

JISCCETIS Conference

Next week, we’re going to be holding a workshop on the repository ecology work at the JISCCETIS conference. The session, being organized by Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell, will complement the ECDL workshop, and further shape the development of this work. http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Learning_Resources_in_the_Ecology_of_Repositories

Spanish Repository Working Group: La ecología de los repositorios institucionales: Interacción entre sociedad, producción científica y acceso a la información

In December, I’ll be presenting at the Spanish Repository Working Group’s conference. They’ve chosen the theme of ecological approaches for their annual meeting this year. I’m not sure how much of the conference I’ll be able to follow at the time, but am looking forward to the opportunity. http://redsicura.iata.csic.es/xarxa/ocs/index.php?cf=6