Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Data Administration and Management

This UKRDS interim report is an early draft from the feasibility stage of the consultancy prepared for the UKRDS Steering Committee. It is intended as a working draft of the Feasibility Study report scheduled for completion in early August 2008. As such it reflects ongoing work and analysis and is subject to further changes and review. It has been produced to inform the steering committee of outcomes to date and solicit their feedback on key issues for the UKRDS feasibility study project.

The interim report includes an initial analysis of the survey carried out of some 700 researchers at the four case study sites (see Appendix A), regarding their current storage provision and future requirements.

Each case study site also provided information from their IT and Support Services regarding the services view of research funding and provision of data storage. From this, we have extracted some trends in the growth of data storage requirements and the planned provision to meet these requirements.

Storing digital data is becoming more essential to the work of librarians, who are trying to think in terms of the next 100 years — a virtual eternity in computer time.

The author, Margaret Henty, provides an Australian perspective on improving the environment in which eResearch is conducted through developing institutional capability and providing appropriate skills training.

This JISC report reviews the variety of data, and arrangements for its curation and use, across disciplines.The work of funders, national data centres, institutional repositories, learned societies and the Digital Curation Centre are all documented, with a view to identifying (as the report's subtitle says) the "roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships", that are emerging as important.

"This publication is a description of a set of ongoing projects, whose goal is to set up an integrated information management system to improve the cooperation between German institutions that provide academic support in the field of information, communication and media services. Each of the contributions demonstrates the different patterns of organisation and services, the various starting points and approaches, the broad diversity of successful activities, and the ongoing problems that characterize the current service and support organisations in German universities."

In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic [1].