The creation, management and use of digital materials are of increasing importance for a wide range of activities. Much of the knowledge base and intellectual assets of institutions and individuals are now in digital form. The term digital curation is increasingly being used for the actions needed to add value to and maintain these digital assets over time for current and future generations of users. The paper explores this emerging field of digital curation as an area of inter-disciplinary research and practice, and the trends which are influencing its development. It analyses the genesis of the term and how traditional roles relating to digital assets are in transition. Finally it explores some of the drivers for curation ranging from trends such as exponential growth in digital information, to "life-caching", digital preservation, the Grid and new opportunities for publishing, sharing, and re-using data. It concludes that significant effort needs to be put into developing a persistent information infrastructure for digital materials and into developing the digital curation skills of researchers and information professionals. Without this, current investment in digitisation and digital content will only secure short-term rather than lasting benefits.

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This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence, opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, memories for life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines.

Since the first general survey of the Romano-British Pewter Industry, published by Wedlake in his report on the excavations at Camerton in 1958, important further work has been done on the typology and distribution of pewter plates and dishes by Christopher Peal, and on the manufacture and typology of pewter vessels in a number of specialist reports. The present author first became interested in the Roman pewter industry whilst researching the development of the early tin industry of South-West England and has undertaken a reassessment of the evidence for the composition, distribution, manufacture and dating of Roman pewter in the light of recent research and examination of unpublished finds in museums.

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