The call for papers is now out for the 15th International Digital
Curation Conference. I've reproduced the call below, rather than just
providing the usual pointer, because I think that the breadth and
interplay  of issues to be explored at the meeting will be of
particular interest to the CNI community. I hope that many of you will
be able to join us in Dublin next year.

CNI has been a honored to collaborate with the IDCC meetings for
fifteen years now!

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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*Collective Curation: the many hands that make data work*

It takes a community to raise a child, so the proverb goes, and the
same applies to digital content. Many stakeholders play a role in
ensuring digital objects are properly created, managed and shared.
Entire research communities need to agree on standards for data
sharing, for example, and actions taken by content creators and
curators have a huge impact on the ability for others to find,
evaluate, understand and reuse objects. Decisions can empower or
marginalise communities, and records can hold great power to help
restore identity, promote truth and support reconciliation.

With modern technology, anyone can be a content creator and provider
with a potentially worldwide audience. The original intention of the
internet as trusted sites of authority exchanging data of known quality
has been overtaken by the flood of content on the world wide web. In
this landscape, how do we evaluate and exchange information and ensure
meaningful knowledge production? How do we harness the freedom and
inclusiveness of the Web while enabling effective curation? How do we
ensure that content is preserved for long-term accessibility?

The 15th International Digital Curation Conference takes place in
Dublin in collaboration with the Digital Repository of Ireland. DRI is
a certified trusted digital repository for Ireland's social and
cultural data, and is widely engaged in a host of research projects
spanning digital cultural heritage, research data management, Open
Science policy and training, data preservation in the humanities and
social sciences, and best practices in digital archiving and open
repository architecture. DRI has organised and hosted dozens of
conferences large and small including its biannual conference, DPASSH
(Digital Preservation in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), and
the Research Data Alliance plenary.

*Papers are invited to address one or more of the themes below*

*Social, political and cultural implications of digital curation*

- Who controls the past, controls the future - empowering community
ownership of collections and the role of records to restore justice
following cultural trauma
- Participatory archiving, citizen science and radical collaboration
- The people behind the data - acknowledging their role, influence and
bias
- Climate change and digital curation - what might our work look like
in 20-50 years?
- Partner and prosper - how content creators and curators should come
together
- Community-owned and open source solutions - a way for the education
sector to keep control of the scholarly commons and its intellectual
output?

*Trust: assessing content and containers*

- Metrics and methods to assess, validate and communicate data quality
within and across communities of use
- Frameworks to certify services as trustworthy and robust
- Persistence: all kinds of identifiers and their role in ensuring trust
- Disruptive technologies and their role in automated verification and
authentication
- All that glitters is not gold - how to make and communicate
appropriate selection decisions and innovative approaches to appraisal?
- Rethinking repositories into active research spaces and collaborative
partners
- In the era of fake news, how do we trust digital content and its
representations in media?

*Data stewardship*

- Data stewards, data agents, data champions and institutional units -
shaping, positioning and recognising new roles
- Engaging and supporting researchers: examples of co-designing
solutions and interdisciplinarity
- Embedding data stewardship in research ecosystems - workflows,
accountability and recognition
- Research assessment - crediting involvement in the creation, curation
and sharing of data
- Defining competencies, curricula and educational programmes to
address skills gaps - for researchers, data producers, data stewards,
research data management librarians and others
- Networking and fora for information exchange and skills sharing
across institutions
- Promoting standardisation to achieve more harmonized practices
- Empowering communities to define data standards and sharing agreements

*Preservation planning*

- Lessons learned from the review, evaluation and re-validation of
curated content
- Curation workflows: linkages between digital triage, preservation
actions and archiving
- Managing de-accession - when does content lose its value?
- National and global approaches to addressing digital preservation
challenges
- Preservation at scale: how can we collaborate and partner on
preservation?
- Preservation challenges in the humanities, social sciences and
cultural heritage
- Long term preservation failures - lessons learnt
- Open source technologies and open standards for long term preservation

*Submissions*

Submission types are likely to include full, peer-reviewed papers as
well as shorter forms with various post-submission review and
publication tracks, as well as posters on the above themes. The
submission deadline for papers will be end of 31st of July; that for
posters will be end of September. We also welcome workshop submissions
on any relevant topic. Workshop submission requirements, deadlines and
review processes are separate from those for other types of content.
More details on the mix of submission types and the requirements for
each track will be released by the 30th of April.

To find out more about IDCC, please visit
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc20 .