California Digital Library Research Articles

Video Editorial: Anatomy of a Book Review: Why We Write, Why We Read Video

Book reviews have long been a staple of the scholarly conversation. Reviews connect researchers to recent publications, expand the audience for individual titles, and shape the boundaries of what counts as part of the library and information studies literature. At the same time, reviews can reinforce traditional academic hierarchies, particularly in terms of what books are reviewed and who is invited to render their opinion. Outgoing C&RL book review editor Emily Drabinski and a group of recent reviewers discussed the state of the academic book review in this lively conversation from January 20, 2023. Emily Drabinski, City University of New York Kaia MacLeod, University of Calgary Mallary Rawls, Florida State University Ashley Michelle Roach, Memphis University Charlotte Roh, California Digital Library Lynne Stahl, Wesleyan University Darren Sweeper, Montclair State University Anders Tobiason, Boise State University View the recording of the Anatomy of a Book Review: Why We Write, Why We Read webcast on the ACRL YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/iCIAEFPNkrM .

Finding Aid Aggregation: Toward a Robust Future

ABSTRACT Over the last twenty-five years, cultural heritage professionals have formed aggregations—of finding aids, digital object metadata, or related forms of description—in order to overcome barriers to creating and presenting structured, consistent, and interoperable description and to enable expanded access. Now most of these aggregators are struggling to update their infrastructure, meet user needs for access to archival collections, and engage with some of the most promising conceptual, technical, and structural advances in the field. In 2018–2019, the “Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network” planning initiative identified what aggregation has accomplished, articulated the key challenges facing aggregators, identified which areas could benefit from collaborative work, and created a vision for that work. With the near-completion of a research and demonstration by the California Digital Library, “Building a National Finding Aid Network” (NAFAN), the project and the archival profession have an opportunity to learn from the past and transform access to cultural heritage. However, none of the large-scale aggregations in the United States present a viable model for sustainability. Sustainability will become possible if they overcome the factors that have limited the success of aggregation so far. These include an over-focus on implementing new technical standards and infrastructure and under-focus on the real limitations: lack of knowledge of end user needs and attempting to accomplish too much without the needed resources. By drawing on both the background research described in this article and the further research conducted during the current NAFAN project, this and other cultural heritage enterprises have an opportunity to create a future in which access to cultural heritage is equalized and expanded for both institutions and end users.

Implementing FAIR Workflows along the research lifecycle

DataCite is a leading non-profit organization that provides DOIs for research datasets and other research outputs – an active participant in the research community that promotes data sharing through different community-building efforts and outreach activities. DataCite is the coordinator leading the “Implementing FAIR Workflows” project that, along with ChronosHub, Dryad, CEDAR, California Digital Library, and Australia Research Data Commons as project partners, aim to develop an exemplar FAIR and Open Research workflow based on the reality of the research lifecycle. ChronosHub, as one of the project partners, acts as an intermediary to facilitate the information flow between the different stakeholders in the research ecosystem. By applying the FAIR principles from the inception of the research project, all the different entities of research information get related to each other, which in the case of Chronoshub, refers to the point of submission of a manuscript to the publisher.This paper discusses how the stakeholders in the research ecosystem can contribute with collaborative actions to build bridges and remove the huge amounts of administrative work that currently is needed for making research FAIR, specifically the data collection, structuring, and quality assurance.

The Expanded Use of DOI and Content Citation Granularity

CSE 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting MODERATOR: Nancy R Gough Publishing Consultant BioSeredipity, LLC Elkridge, Maryland SPEAKERS: Midori Baer Director Publishing Operations PLOS Washington, DC Stacy Konkiel Director Research Relations Almetrics & Dimensions, Digital Science Minneapolis, Minnesota Daniella Lowenberg Dryad Product Manager & Make Data Count Lead California Digital Library San Francisco, California REPORTER: Beverly Lindeen Senior Managing Editor Allen Press, Inc. Lawrence, Kansas It is pretty well known that DOIs (digital object identifiers) are used for articles that are published in an online format. However, they are also necessary for the various parts of an article, such as preprints, figures, tables, databases, data, methods, etc. Nancy Gough moderated this session looking at how DOIs for these items is used by publishers and indexing services. In her presentation entitled “Expanded Use of DOIs at PLOS,” Midori Baer, Director Publishing Operations at PLOS, reviewed the ways in which PLOS uses DOIs as part of their larger organizational mission of “empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.” The continuum of research is important, as is the abilityof the authors to tell the stories of their science. Research needs to be discoverable. Article assets (supplementary information and datasets, tables, figures, peer-review reports, etc.) are assigned DOIs and are registered as component DOIs with Crossref. A link to the DOI appears in both the html and PDF views of all the article assets. There are currently limitations. On the PLOS website, it would be beneficial to […]

Start-up Story

How can open source infrastructure support a modernized, accelerated book production workflow? The California Digital Library, the University of California Press and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation collaborated to design a new platform – Editoria – to do exactly this, following a new user-driven design method to result in a simple, people-centric interface. This case study details the main problem facing publishers who are restrained by outdated, print-oriented production platforms, the ‘reimagining’ exercise and the iterative design process that has resulted in new technology which can be adopted, adapted and integrated by publishers.

Uniform resolution of compact identifiers for biomedical data

Most biomedical data repositories issue locally-unique accessions numbers, but do not provide globally unique, machine-resolvable, persistent identifiers for their datasets, as required by publishers wishing to implement data citation in accordance with widely accepted principles. Local accessions may however be prefixed with a namespace identifier, providing global uniqueness. Such “compact identifiers” have been widely used in biomedical informatics to support global resource identification with local identifier assignment. We report here on our project to provide robust support for machine-resolvable, persistent compact identifiers in biomedical data citation, by harmonizing the Identifiers.org and N2T.net (Name-To-Thing) meta-resolvers and extending their capabilities. Identifiers.org services hosted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and N2T.net services hosted at the California Digital Library (CDL), can now resolve any given identifier from over 600 source databases to its original source on the Web, using a common registry of prefix-based redirection rules. We believe these services will be of significant help to publishers and others implementing persistent, machine-resolvable citation of research data.

One for Nine Ten: Cataloging for Consortia Collections, a UC model

ABSTRACTIn January 2000, the University of California created the Shared Cataloging Program (SCP). Based at the University of California, San Diego, the SCP is a “centralized cataloging model” for the California Digital Library consortium collections. This article will take an evolutionary look at the perpetual challenges of sustaining a consortial cataloging model and highlight the efforts of the SCP in the ongoing quest to eliminate the redundancy of efforts by centralizing the optimization of cataloging efficiency.

PIDapalooza – the open festival for persistent identifiers

In 2016 three persistent identifier (PID) organizations – Crossref, DataCite and ORCID – together with California Digital Library organized PIDapalooza, the first open festival for PIDs. The next PIDapalooza will take place on 23–24 January 2018 in Girona, Spain. This review reports back on PIDapalooza 2016 and looks forward to PIDapalooza 2018.

Next-Generation Data Management Plans: Global, Machine-Actionable, FAIR

At IDCC 2016 the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) announced plans to merge our respective data management planning tools, DMPonline and DMPTool, into a single platform. By formalizing our partnership and co-developing a core infrastructure for data management plans (DMPs), we aim to meet the skyrocketing demand for our services in our national, and increasingly international, contexts. The larger goal is to engage with what is now a global DMP agenda and help make DMPs a more useful exercise for all stakeholders in the research enterprise. This year we offer a progress report that encompasses our co-development roadmap and future enhancements focused on implementing use cases for machine-actionable DMPs.

It’s How Many Terabytes?! A Case Study on Managing Large Born Digital Audio-visual Acquisitions

In October 2014, the University of California Irvine (UCI) Special Collections and Archives acquired a born digital collection of 2.5 terabytes – the largest born digital collection acquired by the department to date. This case study describes the challenges we encountered when applying existing archival procedures to appraise, store, and provide access to a large born digital collection. It discusses solutions when they could be found and ideas for solutions when they could not, lessons learned from the experience, and the impact on born-digital policy and procedure at UCI Libraries. Working with a team of archivists, librarians, IT, and California Digital Library (CDL) staff, we discovered issues and determined solutions that will guide our procedures for future acquisitions of large and unwieldy born digital collections.Â

The University of California Pay It Forward Open Access Publishing Research Project: An Interview with MacKenzie Smith

ABSTRACTIn 2014, University of California, Davis University Library and the California Digital Library collaborated on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded project to explore costs associated with moving scholarly journal subscriptions in the U.S. market entirely to an Article Processing Charge business model, known also as “Gold Open Access.” We contacted MacKenzie Smith, one of the principal investigators, in order to get her reflections on the process of gathering the data, and to discuss some implications of the findings. The interview suggests that the “Pay It Forward” model could be successful over time, following a necessarily complex transition period.

NASA EOSDIS Data Identifiers: Approach and System

NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project began investigating the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in 2010 with the goal of assigning DOIs to various data products. These Earth science research data products produced using Earth observations and models are archived and distributed by twelve Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) located across the United States. Each data center serves a different Earth science discipline user community and, accordingly, has a unique approach and process for generating and archiving a variety of data products. These varied approaches present a challenge for developing a DOI solution. To address this challenge, the ESDIS Project has developed processes, guidelines, and several models for creating and assigning DOIs. Initially the DOI assignment and registration process was started as a prototype but now it is fully operational. In February 2012, the ESDIS Project started using the California Digital Library (CDL) EZID for registering DOIs. The DOI assignments were initially labor-intensive. The system is now automated, and the assignments are progressing rapidly. As of February 28, 2017, over 50% of the data products at the DAACs had been assigned DOIs. Citations using the DOIs increased from about 100 to over 370 between 2015 and 2016.

Letter from the Advisor

Letter from the Advisor Professor Ruth Mostern This is my final semester as Faculty Advisor to the Undergraduate Historical Journal at UC Merced. The four years that I have spent in this role have been one of my great satisfactions as a UC Merced faculty member, and it is with regret that I am now moving on. Paradoxically, what has made me proudest of all is that I have had almost nothing to do with success of the journal. In the Fall of 2013, it was a group of students who approached me with their own well-developed plan for an undergraduate history research journal. Neither I nor anyone else on the faculty put them up to it. It was the students who got approval to publish with the California Digital Library eScholarship program, and it was they who assembled an editorial board and drafted bylaws, procedures, and editorial guidelines. The journal has been fully in the hands of its student editorial boards and its student authors ever since. I have been sitting on the sidelines and cheered them on. Occasionally I ask the editors whether they want any feedback or advice from me, and usually they politely and respectfully turn me down. I would not want it any other way! The excellence of the scholarship and the quality of the editing is consistently outstanding. The Undergraduate Historical Journal has not missed an issue since it began, in spite of the fact that its editors have a pesky habit of graduating just as they start to get the hang of things. To date, not including the present issue, the journal has published twenty-five articles and eleven book reviews, and I am confident that it will be a fixture of the intellectual life of UC Merced for many years to come. The current issue features a typically strong and diverse collection of scholarship that includes seven articles and a number of senior thesis abstracts. The articles concern Mexico, England, and the United States; they include papers on global geopolitics and our own town of Merced, and they span three hundred years of time. Collectively they reveal the curiosity, creativity, and accomplishments of the History students of UC Merced. I know how hard the authors and the editorial board have worked to bring this issue to fruition and to maintain the whole journal venture. My warmest congratulations to all of you. Fiat Lux! Ruth Mostern Associate Professor of History Faculty Advisor to the Journal May 15, 2017

Dash: Data Sharing Made Easy at the University of California

Scholars at the ten campuses of the University of California system, like their academic peers elsewhere, increasingly are being asked to ensure that data resulting from their research and teaching activities are subject to effective long-term management, public discovery, and retrieval. The new academic imperative for research data management (RDM) stems from mandates from public and private funding agencies, pre-publication requirements, institutional policies, and evolving norms of scholarly discourse. In order to meet these new obligations, scholars need access to appropriate disciplinary and institutional tools, services, and guidance. When providing help in these areas, it is important that service providers recognize the disparity in scholarly familiarity with data curation concepts and practices. While the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library supports a growing roster of innovative curation services for University use, most were intended originally to meet the needs of institutional information professionals, such as librarians, archivists, and curators. In order to address the new curation concerns of individual scholars, UC3 realized that it needed to deploy new systems and services optimized for stakeholders with widely divergent experiences, expertise, and expectations. This led to the development of Dash, an online data publication service making campus data sharing easy. While Dash gives the appearance of being a full-fledged repository, in actuality it is only a lightweight overlay layer that sits on top of standards-compliant repositories, such as UC3’s existing Merritt curation repository. The Dash service offers intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces for dataset submission, description, publication, and discovery. By imposing minimal prescriptive eligibility and submission requirements; automating and hiding the mechanical details of DOI assignment, data packaging, and repository deposit; and featuring a streamlined, self-service user experience that can be integrated easily into scholarly workflows, Dash is an important new service offering with which UC scholars can meet their RDM obligations.Â

Roadmap: A Research Data Management Advisory Platform

The DMPTool and DMPonline were developed to meet an emerging need arising from the advent of open data policies and each is now well established as the resource for researchers seeking guidance in creating data management plans (DMPs) in the US and UK respectively. Both services, and their sponsoring organizations, the California Digital Library (CDL) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), have succeeded in enabling researchers to comply with funder requirements in producing DMPs. However, this is just one step along the road to advancing open science. We see an opportunity to further leverage DMPs to support open science by integrating them into the broader ecosystem of data management infrastructure. In order to achieve this goal, we must redefine success to include not just adoption of our services by institutions but also widespread adoption by individual researchers, disciplinary communities, and funders. Working together with all stakeholders to make DMPs an essential, open part of the research lifecycle, and not just a matter of compliance, is the next step toward effectively managing and sharing research data. We propose to join forces and build a new, global data management advisory platform that links DMPs to other components of the research lifecycle. The biomedical research community provides an opportunity to adapt the infrastructure and associated educational resources to one specific disciplinary community and plug into new initiatives. We will reposition DMPs as living documents useful for structuring the course of biomedical research activities and integrating with related data management systems to lower the barriers for implementation and promote culture change. Consolidating around a single platform for DMPs extends our reach, keeps costs down, and moves best practices forward, allowing us to participate in a truly global open science ecosystem.

Faculty Decisions on Serials Subscriptions Differ Significantly from Decisions Predicted by a Bibliometric Tool

A Review of:
 Knowlton, S. A., Sales, A. C., & Merriman, K. W. (2014). A comparison of faculty and bibliometric valuation of serials subscriptions at an academic research library. Serials Review, 40(1), 28-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2014.897174 
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To compare faculty choices of serials subscription cancellations to the scores of a bibliometric tool.
 
 Design – Natural experiment. Data was collected about faculty valuations of serials. The California Digital Library Weighted Value Algorithm (CDL-WVA) was used to measure the value of journals to a particular library. These two sets of scores were then compared. 
 
 Setting – A public research university in the United States of America.
 
 Subjects – Teaching and research faculty, as well as serials data.
 
 Methods – Experimental methodology was used to compare faculty valuations of serials (based on their journal cancellation choices) to bibliometric valuations of the same journal titles (determined by CDL-WVA scores) to identify the match rate between the faculty choices and the bibliographic data. Faculty were asked to select titles to cancel that totaled approximately 30% of the budget for their disciplinary fund code. This “keep” or “cancel” choice was the binary variable for the study. Usage data was gathered for articles downloaded through the link resolver for titles in each disciplinary dataset, and the CDL-WVA scores were determined for each journal title based on utility, quality, and cost effectiveness. 
 
 Titles within each dataset were ranked highest to lowest using the CDL-WVA scores within each fund code, and then by subscription cost for titles with the same CDL-WVA score. The journal titles selected for comparison were those that ranked above the approximate 30% of titles chosen for cancellation by faculty and CDL-WVA scores.
 
 Researchers estimated an odds ratio of faculty choosing to keep a title and a CDL-WVA score that indicated the title should be kept. The p-value for that result was less than 0.0001, indicating that there was a negligible probability that the results were by chance. They also applied logistic regression to quantify the association between the numeric score of CDL-WVA and the binary variable of the faculty choices. The p-value for this relationship was less than 0.0001, also indicating that the result was not by chance. A quadratic model plotted alongside the previous linear model follows a similar pattern. The p-value of the comparison is 0.0002, which indicates the quadratic model’s fit cannot be explained by random chance. 
 
 Main Results – The authors point out three outstanding findings. First, the match rate between faculty valuations and bibliometric scores for serials is 65%. This exceeds the 50% rate that would indicate random association, but also indicates a statistically significant difference between faculty and bibliometric valuations. Secondly, the match rate with the bibliometric scores for titles that faculty chose to keep (73%) was higher than those they chose to cancel (54%). Thirdly, the match rate increased with higher bibliometric scores.
 
 Conclusions – Though the authors identify only a modest degree of similarity between faculty and bibliometric valuations of serials, it is noted that there is more agreement in the higher valued serials than the lower valued serials. With that in mind, librarians might focus faculty review on the lower scoring titles in the future, taking into consideration that unique faculty interests may drive selection at that level and would need to be balanced with the mission of the library.

Role Model Effects of Female Stem Teachers and Doctors on Early 20th Century University Enrollment in California

Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.10.16 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY http://cshe.berkeley.edu/ ROLE MODEL EFFECTS OF FEMALE STEM TEACHERS AND DOCTORS ON EARLY 20 TH CENTURY UNIVERSITY ENROLLMENT IN CALIFORNIA December 2016 Zach Bleemer UC Berkeley Copyright 2016 Zach Bleemer, all rights reserved. ABSTRACT What was the role of imperfect local information in the growth, gender gap, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) major selection of early 20th century American universities? In order to examine pre-1950 American higher education, this study constructs four rich panel datasets covering most students, high school teachers, and doctors in the state of California between 1893 and 1946 using recently-digitized administrative and commercial directories. Students attending large California universities came from more than 600 California towns by 1910, with substantial geographic heterogeneity in female participation and STEM major selection. About 43 percent of university students in 1900 were women, and the number of women attending these universities increased by more than 500 percent between 1900 and 1940. Meanwhile, the number of California towns with female high school physics or chemistry teachers doubled between 1903 and 1923, while the proportion of towns with a female doctor increased from 20 to 26 percent (adding almost 60 towns) during the same period. Event study regression analysis shows that towns became 9-15 percentage points more likely to send at least one female student to the institutions examined in this study after the arrival of their first female high school physics or chemistry teacher or female doctor, implying a 2 percentage point increase in the likelihood of young women’s college attendance, but that the arrival of female STEM teachers decreases the likelihood of a town’s sending a male STEM student to university by 10 percentage points. This study establishes the role of limited information and social networks in early 20th century educational choices, and has implications for both historical growth accounting and contemporary educational practices in developing economies. It also provides a window into the tremendous socioeconomic mobility afforded by California’s commitment to mass higher education. This is the first of several planned studies that are part of the new UC Cliometric History Project based as CSHE in anticipation of UC’s 150 th anniversary. Keywords: Education History, California Universities, College Enrollment, Major Selection Children may not obey, but children will listen Children will look to you for which way to turn To learn what to be Careful before you say “Listen to me” Children will listen ∼ Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods ∼ Jenny: ‘Studying is hard and boring. Teaching is hard and boring. So you’re telling me to be bored, and then bored, and then finally bored again, this time for the rest of my life ... It’s not enough to educate us any more, Mrs. Walters. You’ve got to tell us why you’re doing it.’ ∼ Nick Hornby, An Education (directed by Lone Scherfig) ∼ Between the 1900 and 1950 birth cohorts, Americans’ average educational attainment increased from grade 8 to grade 12, and the proportion of both men and women who attended college more than quadrupled. How did this massive expansion of secondary and post-secondary education shape growth, gender roles, and technological advancement in the United States? Building on a large empirical literature studying the determinants of college attendance, the university gender gap, and the selection of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields in the United States 1 , this study examines the function of Thanks to David Card, Brad DeLong, John Douglass, Barry Eichengreen, Claudia Goldin, Jasjeet Sekhon, Christopher Walters, and Basit Zafar as well as seminar participants at the All-California Labor Economics Conference, the UC Berkeley Economic History Lunch, the UC Berkeley Graduate Student Summer Seminar, and the Center for Studies in Higher Education Seminar for helpful comments. Thanks as well to Renata Ewing, Lynne Grigsby, Mary Elings, the California Digital Library, the HathiTrust Digital Library, and the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library for aiding

Research Data Management Self-Education for Librarians: A Webliography.

The article offers information on websites about research data management, including California Digital Library DMPTools Webinars available at http://dmptool.org/community resources, New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum available at http://library.umassmed.edu/necdmc and Lynda available at www.lynda.com/.

Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology

Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa FINAL DRAFT, September 2015 To be published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Fall 2015 issue on the theme “Alternative Academic Careers and 21 st Century Scholarship” In 2003, with recent Ph.D.s in Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology in hand, we did something risky. We decided to step off the traditional academic career path and pave a new road. This approach, which has since become known as an “alt-ac” (alternative academic) career, is gaining many followers, particularly in the face of the increasing corporatization of the university, which has cast much doubt on the future of traditional academic career paths. Our story is not unusual. Everyone knows that it is very difficult to find a job in archaeology. It’s even harder to find two jobs in one place. We were at an age where we were willing to take some risks, and we had an idea. As recent graduate students, we had both collected original data from our own analyses, and transcribed data from the published literature. Rather than see this as a rite of passage that all graduate students should go through, why not speed discovery and multiply the impact of that work by using the Web to share that effort? As we discussed this, driving along California Interstate 580 one afternoon in the year 2000, the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) was born. In the fifteen years since then, the AAI and Open Context, have emerged as leading players as 21 st century archaeological scholarship goes online. Open Context is an open access data publishing platform for archaeology, which is now referenced by NSF and NEH for data management for archaeology and the digital humanities. Its approach of “data sharing as publishing” emphasizes collaboration with dedicated editorial and information specialists (us) to make data more intelligible and usable. Open Context publishes a wide variety of archaeological data, ranging from archaeological survey data to excavation documentation, artifact analyses, chemical analyses of artifacts, and detailed descriptions of bones and other biological remains found in archaeological contexts. The range, scale, and diversity of these data require expertise in data modeling and a commitment to continual development and iterative problem solving. Open Context has undergone several upgrades, the most recent in spring of 2015, to keep pace with technology changes and to leverage best practices in data stewardship. With data preservation through the University of California (the California Digital Library), Open Context now publishes more than a 1.2 million archaeological records from projects worldwide. This is on a scale comparable to that of a major museum (for instance, the online collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York makes some 407,000 records available). Open Context has made this remarkable achievement on a much more limited budget than the online collections of major museums. Grant funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the NEH, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, NSF, and others has gone a long way largely because of the AAI’s status as an independent non-profit organization with an overhead much, much lower than large research institutions. The AAI and Open Context have also benefited from the growth of the Web and the

DataUp: A tool to help researchers describe and share tabular data.

Scientific datasets have immeasurable value, but they lose their value over timewithout proper documentation, long-term storage, and easy discovery and access.Across disciplines as diverse as astronomy, demography, archeology, and ecology,large numbers of small heterogeneous datasets (i.e., the long tail of data) are especially at risk unless they are properly documented, saved, and shared. One unifyingfactor for many of these at-risk datasets is that they reside in spreadsheets. In response to this need, the California Digital Library (CDL) partnered withMicrosoft Research Connections and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation tocreate the DataUp data management tool for Microsoft Excel. Many researcherscreating these small, heterogeneous datasets use Excel at some point in their datacollection and analysis workflow, so we were interested in developing a data management tool that fits easily into those work flows and minimizes the learning curvefor researchers. The DataUp project began in August 2011. We first formally assessed theneeds of researchers by conducting surveys and interviews of our target research groups: earth, environmental, and ecological scientists. We found that, on average, researchers had very poor data management practices, were not aware of datacenters or metadata standards, and did not understand the benefits of data management or sharing. Based on our survey results, we composed a list of desirablecomponents and requirements and solicited feedback from the community to prioritize potential features of the DataUp tool. These requirements were then relayedto the software developers, and DataUp was successfully launched in October 2012.