On behalf of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the School of Information & Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I would like to invite you to join the International Digital curation Education and Action (IDEA) Working Group Network. IDEA is a joint initiative developed by the DCC and UNC at Chapel Hill which aims to:

·       Foster collaborative international partnerships among digital and data curation educators, researchers, and funding agencies;

·       Raise the profile of digital and data curation in general (benefits driven) to help ensure that we can justify the establishment and sustainability of sound infrastructures in higher education (HE) and further education (FE) institutions;

·       Identify benchmarks for curation-related education and training programmes

·       Continue investigation and make recommendations for digital and data curation terminology.

·       Disseminate documentation for public access via the Digital Curation Exchange.

Please see the IDEA website for information on the working group's mission at www.ideaworkgroup.org. 

In order to stay abreast of IDEA activities, you can to subscribe to the new IDEA working group listserv email list. This list will be used to share IDEA updates and relevant digital curation education news.  

To subscribe, follow this link to a web page where you may subscribe to the mailing list: 

To send messages to members of the listserv once you've joined, send an email to: [log in to unmask]

To visit the listserv forum, follow http://lists.unc.edu/read/?forum=ideaworkgroup. You may also review and edit your account from this page. Note: If you log in and you have not created a password, just click 'OK' when it asks you for a password and you will be logged in. 

The IDEA working group is split into three sub-committees each addressing a specific aspect of training and education.

-Graduate Curriculum led by Cal Lee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

-Continuing Professional Education and Training led by Helen Tibbo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

-Work Force led by Joy Davidson, DCC.

For more information on each of the sub-committees please see http://ideaworkgroup.org/subcommittees.html.  If you are interested in joining a subcommittee, please respond to this email and I will send you instructions for joining the subcommittee groups on the Digital Curation Exchange website (digitalcurationexchange.org). 

We will be holding an IDEA workshop at iPres 2010 in Vienna, Austria. The workshop will take place from Wednesday (22 September) noon until Thursday (23 September) noon. For more information on the iPres conference, please see http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010/.

We hope to see many of you at the workshop and on the listserv. Please feel free to contact me for more information.

Sincerely,

Heather Bowden