I'm afraid we're going to see more data-security horror stories like this in the next few years. It's truly horrific for everyone involved. Rather than point fingers, because there are multiple levels of epic fail in this situation and nobody comes out smelling like roses, I'll try to pull out some more-or-less depersonalized morals-of-the-story: Knowing...

The question of research-IT provisioning came up in my post on data-security horror stories. I saw some confusion from readers about it, and it's worth examining in detail for other reasons, so here goes. So let's imagine Achaea University for a moment: immense, a diverse research agenda across many disciplines, lots of grants coming in, but some areas...

I have some zombie-ish tendencies of my own, so I was most interested to read such a thorough, well-researched investigation of Zombies and Risk to Repositories. I feel ever so much better now that I know how to protect digital assets from the undead hordes. Don't you?

I'm afraid we're going to see more data-security horror stories like this in the next few years. It's truly horrific for everyone involved. Rather than point fingers, because there are multiple levels of epic fail in this situation and nobody comes out smelling like roses, I'll try to pull out some more-or-less depersonalized morals-of-the-story: Knowing...

So I go to a perfectly nice conference last year and get trapped by a volcano. I try to get to OLA Superconference, and there's an epic blizzard. (I'm still going to try to make Top Tech Trends, but my Friday talk is cancelled. Pity. I put a lot of work into that talk.) I dunno if it's safe to go on the conference circuit any more!

I grumbled on FriendFeed today that I wish folks (IT folks in particular) would understand that there is no single metadata schema that works for every kind of data in every form in every situation. If you're building a data repository intending to store many kinds of data from many disciplines, it had better have a metadata model that accommodates...