Curation of digital data through their lifecycle poses interesting technical and organizational challenges. Curation includes activities such as data assessment and selection, description, classification, linking data, name management, versioning, archiving, search and discovery. Data lifecycle may include all or some phases such as creation or conversion, analysis and processing, sharing, dissemination or transfer, preservation, access and retrieval, and disposition. We believe libraries, in collaboration with other divisions and departments, are prime candidates to play a lead role in research and development in this area. This presentation will introduce some initiatives undertaken in this area at the University of Maryland Libraries. It will also discuss, in more depth, an approach we are investigating in developing a repository system for management and curation of digital data as described above.
Babak Hamidzadeh received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of Minnesota in 1989 and 1993, respectively. In that period, he also worked as a research associate at The Systems and Research Center of Honeywell Inc., and as a research scientist at The Research and Technology Center of Alliant Techsystems Inc. for over 3 years. From 1993 to 1996 he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of British Columbia from 1996 to 2000 and an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the same university from 2000 to 2002. He was also a Fellow of The BC Advanced Systems Institute and the holder of a Canada Research Chair in Information Technology. From 2002 to 2004 he was The Senior Manager of the Information Management and Collaborative Technologies Research at The Boeing Company. From 2004 to 2011 he was the Director of the Repository Development Center at the Library of Congress. Currently, he is the Associate Dean of Digital Systems and Stewardship at the University of Maryland Libraries. His technical area of interest is information and digital asset management.