"Which representation of the records will be the target of preservation?"

The management of digital objects (e.g. articles, datasets, images, streams of data, multimedia objects) and non-digital objects (namely real-world entities, like authors, institutions, teams, geographic locations, etc.) is a crucial issue for the whole scientific and administrative process within an academic institution.

The need to unambiguously locate and access the digital resources, as well as associate them with the related metadata (e.g. authors, relevant entities, institutions, research groups, projects, administrative organisational units) is an essential requirement for managing, accessing, reusing, retrieving and preserving huge amounts of cultural and intellectual resources.

Along with the tide of Big Data, the relevance of this issue has been dramatically increased, making it clear that academic institutions have to take actions and develop plans that foster achievement of these goals. In this Conference, we argue that the introduction of comprehensive Data Management Plans is the imminent step for the Instiutions and their repositories which seek to fulfil requirements set to them.

Data Management Plans facilitate the curation process of digital objects. Thus, the time and effort spent by the curators is minimized.