When the Data hits the Fan!

Offering a new view of Sudan to the world and to itself through digitisation. by Marilyn Deegan "Documentary heritage reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures. It is the mirror of the world and its memory. But this memory is fragile. Every day, irreplaceable parts of this memory disappear for ever."     UNESCO Memory of the World Programme. Introduction Simon’s blog post on the destruction of cultural heritage in Mali back in January of this year stirred a great deal of interest, and as a direct consequence, he and I have become involved in a project called Digital Sudan , an effort to digitise Sudanese cultural heritage and stop the loss of valuable content though decay and destruction.

A debate was held at The Royal Society on 10th July, 2013 titled Maximising the use of public data – should research and publicly acquired data be made more accessible? At this debate David Willetts MP and Minister of State for Universities and Science gave his strong support for Open Data and stated that " the public have a right to access publicly funded research ". This blog post gives details of the debate with links to the resources available from the organisers  The Foundation for Science and Technology . It also asks the question: is this an unfunded mandate?