News

DPC Members, please save the date for our annual Members Unconference event in Dublin on Tuesday 28th and Wednesday 29th May 2024.

Exclusively for DPC Members, the Unconference will be hosted by the Digital Repository of Ireland and will take place face-to-face at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin over the course of two days. It will form part of a worldwide program of Member networking activities which aims to offer events in locations in other parts of the world as scheduling permits (details to follow in due course).

Martin Eve of CrossRef has some sobering news for researchers. A recent analysis suggests that around a quarter of academic publications are not being preserved for the future. 

Eve’s sample is based on the assessment of around 7.5 million of the e-books and articles for which CrossRef provides a fixed identifier, or Digital Object Identifier.   These identifiers prevent ‘link rot’ so that, even if a URL changes, an article or book can still be cited and retrieved.  But they’re not enough on their own because they only preserve the link not the destination. So, unless there’s a preservation service guaranteeing the content, the DOI will stop working if a publisher goes out of business or simply removes a title.  Scholarly content needs to be preserved before it is deleted, not after. 

Prompted by the 2022 Society of American Archivists (SAA) publication of Museum Archives: Practice, Issues, Advocacy (ed. Rachel Chatalbash, Susan Hernandez, and Megan Schwenke), the Yale Center for British Art and SAA's Museum Archives Section are hosting a one-day symposium to examine the current position and future directions of the museum archives field. The symposium will be held in person at the Yale University Art Gallery and livestreamed online. We welcome proposals from new and established museum archivists, and their professional allies, that examine any aspect of the museum archives profession. Themes for consideration include, but are not limited to: