There seem to be two very important questions that need to be answered when creating a new web resource or tool; what colour is it going to be and what shall we call it?
The first is often resolved by a quick staff poll overruled by the one person who isn’t colour blind, or the one who is acknowledge to have a modicum of taste. The second is a different matter.
We have recently played host to two colleagues from the Netherlands. Data Archiving and Networked Services, DANS, is an organisation well known to many of you; they have worked at the forefront of digital preservation for many years and have deservedly built a reputation as one of the leaders in the field. DANS have pipped us to the post in establishing an online tool for the submission of archives by practitioners. DANS’ Electronic Archiving SYstem, or ‘DANS EASY’, allows upload of research data into the DANS servers in a structured fashion, associating the deposited files with the appropriate metadata and incorporating access management and licensing into the process too.
The similarities to the tool that we have been developing in the SWORD ARM project are so strong that we couldn’t help appropriating part of the DANS name. And so ‘ADS easy’, ADS’ e-archiving system, has been born.
We think that the younger sibling has managed to evolve a little though and can boast a couple of additional useful limbs; a charging module and an area to sort and organise your archive which helps in selecting, and deleting, those files that may not add to the archive and also allows for a more ordered way of creating metadata.
We plan to demonstrate ‘ADS easy’ to project partners at a workshop in August … I hope they like the colour!
