[Rdap] Digital Preservation Work Featured in May issue of Discover Magazine

[Joe Hourcle]

On Jun 21, 2011, at 2:27 PM, Michael J. Giarlo wrote:

> I've been mulling this over the past week, and I'm not sure a 
> mega-conference about all things digital- and data-related would be very 
> attractive to me.  Open Repositories and RDAP seem to be geared 
> primarily towards the practitioner side of the practice-research 
> spectrum, whereas my impression of JCDL and its peers are more towards 
> the research side.
> 
> If OR and RDAP become less about practice than theory, then I can see 
> practitioners losing interest -- and they need events to share best 
> practices, tools, and tips.
> 
> Additionally, both OR and JCDL seem like rather long meetings when you 
> factor in pre-conferences and post-conferences.  I wouldn't want them to 
> be any longer, and I rather like that RDAP is as short as it is.
> 
> I see a real need for conferences like OR and RDAP for those of us who 
> have boots on the ground, and I do hope they remain separate.
> 
> If RDAP is to be merged into JCDL, I would hope that the relationship 
> would be similar to RDAP's relationship with IA Summit, which is to say 
> that one can attend RDAP without needing to drop extra dollars on a 
> longer, less relevant conference (for some of us).

Perhaps, if we were to join forces with JCDL or another conference,
we could try to organize it as a pre-conference workshop, so we'd 
have a day or two to discuss the 'practical' side of things, but those
people who were interested in the academic/research side could
still hit both.

I mean, as much as research is nice, I'm more interested in being able
to implement systems, rather than spend a few months/years studying
the problem and trying to come up with an abstract solution.  I've actually
had to keep from laughing at some conferences when people are
presenting as 'new' studies stuff that people in the trenches could've
told 'em years ago.

-Joe