Professor Seamus Ross from University of Toronto Lectures on Digital Resilience and the Renewable Data Economy

    On October 27, Seamus Ross, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto delivered a lecture at Luojia Forum entitled Digital Resilience and the Renewable Data Economy: Emerging approaches to data management across time, technologies, and socio-cultural environments.

    Professor Rosslooked at issues surrounding digital curation policies and practices and detailed how new approaches to policies, digital entity resilience, risk, automation, and performance assessment providing innovative data management tools and methods to enable long term accessibility of digital materials. We can hardly overlook the ways information and communication technology (ICT) has transformed the means by which contemporary society creates, accesses, uses, and needs to manage digital entities. Massive reservoirs of digital material  encapsulate the memories of our society, evidence of contemporary decisions, and records of discrete events. They are resources of increasingly significant social value and economic potential. At the same time, professor Ross considered that many aspects inherent in the very digitality of this material itself conspires to obscure its meaning and to make it inaccessible.

    Dr. Ross served as Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre in the U.K. (2004-2009) and was Principal Director of ERPANET (2001-2004) and Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) (2006-2009). His scholarly research has focused on digital humanities, digital preservation, digitization, digital repositories and risk management, emulation, digital archaeology, semantic extraction and genre classification, and cultural heritage informatics.