In August 2012, the Orbital project made the decision to adopt CKAN as part of a technical infrastructure for RDM. In February, due to interest from other universities, we held a workshop in London that looked more closely at ‘CKAN4RDM’. At the end of May, I presented a paper on the use of CKAN for RDM at two conferences: OpenAIRE/LIBER (Ghent, Belgium) and IASSIST (Cologne, Germany).
The paper has been available for comment on Google Docs for over two weeks and viewed by over 200 people. I specifically asked the CKAN-DEV, CKAN-DISCUSS and CKAN4RDM mailing lists, as well as conference attendees to provide feedback on the paper. The conference sessions were very well attended (I guess 400 people must have heard me present the paper across both occasions) and from conversations afterwards, the paper seems to have generated a decent amount of interest as well as raise the awareness of CKAN among data librarians and data archivists.
The paper can now be downloaded in its final form from the Lincoln Repository and my conference presentation slides are below. I hope that my recommendations lead to the further use and development of CKAN for the management of research data. Do join the CKAN4RDM mailing list if you’d like to discuss this further.
http://vimeo.com/68118601