Lecture of Visiting Professor Seamus Ross at 9/3/2016

Room: A41, Antoniadou wing, main building

Time: 11:00-12:00 Wednesday March 9th

Speaker: 

Prof Seamus Ross
Visiting Professor Athens University of Economics and Business 2016 and Professor Universities of Toronto and Glasgow. 
 

Title: Enabling Digital Curation in the Context of Digital Repositories:  Risk Assessment, Management and Mitigation 

Abstract: Digital repositories, from institutional offerings to commercial cloud-based services, have emerged in recent years as the  primary mechanisms for ensuring the long term accessibility of digital objects. There has been much discussion in the digital curation communities about how we establish institutional, public, and personal trust in these repositories.  Various approaches have been developed for assessing the trustworthiness of repositories in the face of such uncertainties and risks as those posed by institutional mandates, technical change, external attacks, and limited funding, The most commonly accepted approaches are fairly binary and relatively static and do not respond to a constantly changing technological, organizational, and financial landscapes, Beginning with the premise that trust is not a binary static attribute but is rather a fluctuating value, this paper re-considers uncertainties and risks in relation to repositories and trust.  It considers the issues of how we assess, understand, document, and manage these risk and alternative approaches for doing so.  

Short Biographical Sketch:
Seamus Ross is Professor in Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, also known as U of T’s iSchool. He served as Dean for seven years (2009-2015). Before joining Toronto, he was Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation and Founding Director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) at the University of Glasgow (1997-2009) and since 2009 continued to hold the rank of Professor at the University of Glasgow.