Catherine and Ray from the SWORD-ARM project were amongst ADS staff who attended the Institute for Archaeologists (IfA) annual conference last week at the Aston Conference Centre in Birmingham. We had the opportunity to display our new poster on the ADS stand and talk to many of the delegates about the plans to roll out the ADS-easy system to the community in June or July this year. We were also able to incorporate information about the system, and how it will work, in to a specific IfA training workshop on digital archiving. Initial feedback from those at the training workshop was really positive; but interestingly the attendees quickly identified that the requirement for archiving should ideally be enforced through either the planning brief or museum deposition requirements. A good start to the role out!

After the very successful JISC event held in Birmingham last month the DCC have pulled together a really interesting blog about the progress of, not just the SWORDARM project, but many of the other projects building business cases around institutional repository, and research data management work. You can find the blog post at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/blog/sweet-smell-sustainability-jisc-mrd-projects-make-business-case