Following the community response to our workshop last year, we want to invite you again to contribute your future preservation challenge!

Digital Preservation has emerged as a key challenge for information systems in almost any domain from eCommerce and eGovernment to finance, health, and personal life. The field is increasingly recognized and has taken major strides in the last decade. However, key areas of research are often limited to applying solutions to existing problems rather than proactively investigating the challenges ahead and probing for innovative break-through approaches that would radically advance the domain.

Open Research Challenges @ IPRES 2013

To provide a forum for eliciting, discussing and refining future research challenges in digital longevity, we are organizing a half-day workshop at IPRES 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal. The goal of this interactive workshop is to elicit and discuss DP research challenges to be tackled in the next decade. It brings together researchers in order to step beyond the limitations of solutions that are applicable now, and develop concepts, models and solutions for upcoming challenges. This will cover diverse areas such as Information Systems, Databases, Information Retrieval, Library and Archival Science, Content Management, Modeling, Simulation, Human-Computer Interaction, Scholarly Communication, Systems Engineering, Cloud computing, Security and others.

The workshop builds on a highly successful first workshop last year, but focuses the discussion on specific topics and encourages participants to arrive at specific research challenges that can be tackled in concrete research designs. The output will be published as a report.

The workshop is an interactive event focusing on discussions and inspirational exchange between participants on challenging new research questions. We do not wish to prescribe topics for challenges, but encourage proposals to think outside of the box and propose challenges that lie ahead rather than research problems that are currently being tackled.

Please submit your description of a research challenge in which you

• argue for the concrete motivation behind this challenge,
• set it in relation to existing work,
• provide a context that enables understanding and further investigation and
• outline, if possible, concrete research designs to tackle the challenge.

This includes questions such as the following

• Why is this topic relevant?
• Why has it not been addressed yet?
• What are the problems involved?
• What is the potential impact if this is successfully addressed?
• What are possible ways of evaluating if it has been addressed?

Format and mode of submissions

Papers must contain the sections Motivation; Current state-of-the-art; Research contributions and benefits; Outlook. Papers must be submitted in PDF format and should be 2-4 pages. They should conform to the ACM SIG template. Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. It is expected that at least one author of each accepted challenge will register for and attend the workshop. Submissions should be sent to [email protected].

Important dates

Challenge submission deadline: July 12, 2013
Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2013
Workshop: September 6, 2013

Up-to-date information can be found at the workshop website: http://digitalpreservationchallenges.wordpress.com