Research Data Curation Research Articles

Are Academic Libraries Changing Fast Enough?

Abstract Academic libraries are under a severe pressure of transforming towards a novel form of information organization. Book circulation, learning space and licensing digital content continue to be core services. But the sciences and the humanities are increasingly requesting support for their novel publishing activities. Open Access in science or digital editions in the humanities, and data-intensive operations in research, e.g. data management plans, research software support or data curation and preservation services become mission critical. Thus, in order to stay the central partner for academic information within the institution, libraries need to change. But how fast could libraries possibly change, if the existing services were also to be continued, particularly considering that budget increases are rare? Experiences at the State and University Library Göttingen (SUB) shall elucidate opportunities and challenges.

Aspectos de inovação na implantação de um centro de digitalização e gestão de dados da pesquisa

Objetiva prover serviços de curadoria e gestão de dados da pesquisa com inovação em P&D a um centro de digitalização e gestão de dados da pesquisa. Caracteriza o ecossistema de P&D em gestão e curadoria de dados da pesquisa, e observa os tipos de processos de inovação que casam com características desse ecossistema. Propõe e cria um ambiente de inovação para o centro, desenvolvendo uma ferramenta fundamentada em trabalho colaborativo, corpos de conhecimento e processos de inovação. Apresenta resultados obtidos a partir do uso do ambiente.

Setting up a National Research Data Curation Service for Qatar: Challenges and Opportunities

Over the past decade, Qatar has been making considerable progress towards developing a sustainable research culture for the nation. The main driver behind Qatar’s progress in research and innovation is Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development (QF), a private, non-profit organization that aims to utilise research as a catalyst for expanding, diversifying and improving the country’s economy, health and environment. While this has resulted in a significant growth in the number of research publications produced by Qatari researchers in recent years, a nationally co-ordinated approach is needed to address some of the emerging but increasingly important aspects of research data curation, such as management and publication of research data as important outputs, and their long-term digital preservation. Qatar National Library (QNL), launched in November 2012 under the umbrella of QF, aims to establish itself as a centre of excellence in Qatar for research data management, curation and publishing to address the research data-related needs of Qatari researchers and academics. This paper describes QNL’s approach towards establishing a national research data curation service for Qatar, highlighting the associated opportunities and key challenges.

Research 2.0 and Research Data Services in academic and research libraries: priority issues

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the role of Research Data Services (RDSs), consisting of research data management, data curation and data stewardship, and data literacy education in supporting Research 2.0. Besides this, theory and principles, as well as selected examples of best practices in the relevant fields are presented.Design/methodology/approachA literature-based overview of actual insights on tasks and roles that academic and research libraries have to fulfil in order to react to the developments generated by the appearance and growing importance of Research 2.0 is provided. Taking the wide spectre of related issues into account, the discussion is limited to RDSs.FindingsEven though Research 2.0 is evolving in different countries and some local environments in dissimilar ways, its data-intensive nature requires the helping presence of academic libraries and librarians. Being an emerging phenomenon, it will undoubtedly take several different shapes as it works itself out in time, but librarians should try to discover service niches, which may not be covered by other academic organisations, or their coverage is only partial or even unsatisfactory.Research limitations/implicationsTaking the wide spectre of issues into account, the review of literature is limited to the period between 2014 and 2016.Originality/valueThe paper intends to add to the body of knowledge about the relationship between RDSs and Research 2.0, as well as about the association between the components of the former.

Book Review of Volume One of Curating Research Data: Practical Strategies for your Digital Repository

Book review:Curating Research Data, Volume One: Practical Strategies for Your Digital Repository, Eds. Lisa R. Johnston. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2017. 294p. $65. ISBN: 978-0838988589.

Practices of research data curation in institutional repositories: A qualitative view from repository staff

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied. The paper can inform the development of best practice guides, infrastructure and service templates, as well as education in research data curation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools.

Editorial

Editorial

Social science research data curation

Data curation is attracting a growing interest in the library and information science community. The main purpose of data curation is to support data reuse. This paper discusses the issues of reusing quantitative social science data from three perspectives of searching and browsing for datasets, evaluating the reusability of datasets (including evaluating topical relevance, utility and data quality), and integrating datasets, by comparing dataset searching with online database searching. The paper also discusses using knowledge representation techniques of metadata and ontology, and a graphical visualization interface to support users in browsing, assessing and integrating datasets.

Beyond the matrix

The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) provides infrastructure and guidance for the sharing and reuse of digital data used in qualitative and multi-method social inquiry. In this paper we describe some of the repository’s early experiences providing services developed specifically for the curation of qualitative research data. We focus on QDR’s efforts to address two key challenges for qualitative data sharing. The first challenge concerns constraints on data sharing in order to protect human participants and their identities and to comply with copyright laws. The second set of challenges addresses the unique characteristics of qualitative data and their relationship to the published text. We describe a novel method of annotating scholarly publications, resulting in a “transparency appendix” that allows the sharing of such “granular data” (Moravcsik et al., 2013). We conclude by describing the future directions of QDR’s services for qualitative data archiving, sharing, and reuse.

From compliance to curation

The University of Oxford’s institutional repository for data, Oxford University Research Archive (ORA)-Data, was launched in May 2015. This article describes a current-state assessment of ORA-Data in relation to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) policy framework on research data and offers some future directions in implementing a more systemic lifecycle approach to research data curation at the University of Oxford with reference to the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model. Insights into the attitudes and requirements of EPSRC-funded researchers at the university in relation to research data management, from a survey we conducted, are explored. Descriptive metadata and identifiers, preservation actions, access, use and reuse and community engagement are considered. ORA-Data is positioned within the wider context of Oxford’s research data management roadmap.

Making Student Research Data Discoverable: A Pilot Program Using Dataverse

INTRODUCTION The support and curation of research data underlying theses and dissertations are an opportunity for institutions to enhance their ETD collections. This article describes a pilot data archiving service that leverages Emory University’s existing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) program. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM This pilot service tested the appropriateness of Dataverse, a data repository, as a data archiving and access solution for Emory University using research data identified in Emory University’s ETD repository, developed the legal documents necessary for a full implementation of Dataverse on campus, and expanded outreach efforts to meet the research data needs of graduate students. This article also situates the pilot service within the context of Emory Libraries and explains how it relates to other library efforts currently underway. NEXT STEPS The pilot project team plans to seek permission from alumni whose data were included in the pilot to make them available publicly in Dataverse, and the team will revise the ETD license agreement to allow this type of use. The team will also automate the ingest of supplemental ETD research data into the data repository where possible and create a workshop series for students who are creating research data as part of their theses or dissertations.

Archival Practices and the Making of “Memories”

Following Derrida (1995), our article explores the relationship between archival practices and archival documents on the assumption that “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida 1995, 17). On this approach, archival practices are understood as non-innocent practices that, in the act of “preservation,” help make specific “memories” at the expense of others (Barad 2007; Derrida 1995; Foucault 1972). We take up this issue in relation to the curation of social science quantitative research data and argue that the ontological identity of data is constituted through historically- and culturally-specific data curation practices including data cleaning, data anonymization, and metadata preparation.

Collection, Curation, Citation at Source: Publication@Source 10 Years On

The Southampton chemical information group had its genesis in 2001, when we began an e-Science pilot project to investigate structure-property mapping, combinatorial chemistry, and the Grid. CombeChem instigated a range of activities that have since been underway for more than ten years, in many ways matching the expansion of interest in using the Web as a vehicle for collection, curation, dissemination, reuse, and exploitation of scientific data and information. Chemistry has frequently provided the exemplar case studies, notably for the series of projects – funded by Jisc and EPSRC – that investigated the issues associated with the long-term preservation of data to support the scholarly knowledge cycle, such as the eBank UK project. Rapid developments in Internet access and mobile technology have significantly influenced the way researchers view connectivity, data standards, and the increasing importance and power of semantics and the Semantic Web. These technical advances interact strongly with the social dimension and have led to a reconsideration of the responsibilities of researchers for the quality of their research and for satisfying the requirements of modern stakeholders. Such obligations have given rise to discussions about Open Access and Open Data, creating a range of alternatives that are now technically feasible but need to be socially acceptable. Business plans are changing too, but in a strange contradiction, desire can run ahead of what is possible, sensible, and affordable, while lagging behind in imagination of what would be technically possible and potentially game-changing! Taking the chemical sciences as our example and focusing on the curation of research data, we explore from our perspective, ten years back and ten years forward, how far we have been able to re-imagine the data/information value pathway from bench to publication. We assess not only the major advances and changes that have been achieved, but also where we have been less successful than we might have hoped. We explore the directions for the future, based on what is clearly already possible and on what we can envisage becoming feasible in the near future.

Harmonizing the Metadata Among Diverse Climate Change Datasets

One of the critical problems in the curation of research data is the harmonization of its internal metadata schemata. The value of harmonizing such data is well illustrated by the Berkeley Earth project, which successfully integrated into one metadata schema the raw climate datasets from a wide variety geographical sources and time periods (250 years). Doing this enabled climate scientists to calculate a more accurate estimate of the recent changes in Earth’s average land surface temperatures and to ascertain the extent to which climate change is anthropogenic. This paper surveys some of the approaches that have been taken to the integration of data schemata in general and examines some of the specific metadata features of the source surface temperature datasets that were harmonized by Berkeley Earth. The conclusion drawn from this analysis is that the original source data and the Berkeley Earth common format provides a promising training set on which to apply machine learning methods for replicating the human data integration process. This paper describes research in progress on a domain-independent approach to the metadata harmonization problem that could be applied to other fields of study and be incorporated into a data portal to enhance the discoverability and reuse of data from a broad range of data sources.

Curating the web’s deep past – Migration strategies for the German Continental Deep Drilling Program web content

On timescales beyond the life of a research project, a core task in the curation of digital research data is the migration of data and metadata to new storage media, new hardware, and software systems. These migrations are necessitated by ageing software systems, ageing hardware systems, and the rise of new technologies in data management. Using the example of the German Continental Deep Drilling Program (KTB) we outline steps taken to keep the acquired data accessible to researchers and trace the history of data management in KTB from a project platform in the early 1990ies through three migrations up to the current data management platform. The migration steps taken not only preserved the data, but also made data from KTB accessible via internet and citable through Digital Object Identifier (DOI). We also describe measures taken to manage hardware and software obsolescence and minimise the amount of maintenance necessary to keep data accessible beyond the active project phase. At present, data from KTB are stored in an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) compliant repository based on the eSciDoc repository framework. Information packages consist of self-contained packages of binary data files and discovery metadata in Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) format. The binary data files were created from a relational database used for data management in the previous version of the system, and from websites generated from a content management system. Metadata are provided in DataCite, GCMD-DIF, and ISO19139/INSPIRE schema definitions. Access to the KTB data is provided through download pages which are produced by XML transformation from the stored metadata.

Mapping Methods Metadata for Research Data

Understanding the methods and processes implemented by data producers to generate research data is essential for fostering data reuse. Yet, producing the metadata that describes these methods remains a time-intensive activity that data producers do not readily undertake. In particular, researchers in the long tail of science often lack the financial support or tools for metadata generation, thereby limiting future access and reuse of data produced. The present study investigates research journal publications as a potential source for identifying descriptive metadata about methods for research data. Initial results indicate that journal articles provide rich descriptive content that can be sufficiently mapped to existing metadata standards with methods-related elements, resulting in a mapping of the data production process for a study. This research has implications for enhancing the generation of robust metadata to support the curation of research data for new inquiry and innovation.

Research data and metadata curation as institutional issues

Research data curation initiatives must support heterogeneous kinds of projects, data, and metadata. This article examines variability in data and metadata practices using “institutions” as the key theoretical concept. Institutions, in the sense used here, are stable patterns of human behavior that structure, legitimize, or delegitimize actions, relationships, and understandings within particular situations. Based on prior conceptualizations of institutions, a theoretical framework is presented that outlines 5 categories of “institutional carriers” for data practices: (a) norms and symbols, (b) intermediaries, (c) routines, (d) standards, and (e) material objects. These institutional carriers are central to understanding how scientific data and metadata practices originate, stabilize, evolve, and transfer. This institutional framework is applied to 3 case studies: the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). These cases are used to illustrate how institutional support for data and metadata management are not uniform within a single organization or academic discipline. Instead, broad spectra of institutional configurations for managing data and metadata exist within and across disciplines and organizations.

Learning to curate

EDITOR'S SUMMARYThree data specialists reviewed their experiences learning about and applying the Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) processes and tools for curating research data. A small virtual community discussed curation theories on data acquisitions, review, processing, metadata and dissemination and shared progress implementing the ICPSR workflows and tools. Curators at Duke University, dealing with data on political donors, found processing obstacles from incomplete and mismatched data and faced confidentiality questions. At Emory University, gaps in coded data on home schooling practices revealed problems arising from lack of preplanning for long‐term archiving and research and the need to clarify data needs for later re‐use. By applying ICPSR processes, curators at UCLA's Social Sciences Data Archive were able to improve their workflow and understand the work necessary for open archiving. All participants gained from the opportunity to practice ICPSR curation practices, realized the resource demands and saw the value librarians can provide by consulting with faculty on data management and preservation.

RDAP14 summit: Introduction

EDITOR'S SUMMARYThe March 2014 ASIS&T Research Data Access and Preservation Summit (RDAP14) held in San Diego, California, featured keynote talks, panel discussions, poster sessions and post‐conference workshops geared to curating research data. Speakers addressed education about data management, putting together data management plans and policy development, with the challenge of defining roles in collaboration woven through presentations. Keynote speakers detailed specific collaborative efforts to promote preservation of and access to research outputs and to facilitate their discovery and reuse. Panels addressed hurdles such as limited resources and coordinating efforts within and beyond institutions, and speakers shared updates on the National Science Foundation's DataNet and the public access requirements of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Followup workshops provided expanded opportunities to learn about instructional practices and assessing data management maturity.

Research Data Curation Pilots: Lessons Learned

In the spring of 2011, the UC San Diego Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) Implementation Team invited researchers and research teams to participate in a research curation and data management pilot program. This invitation took the form of a campus-wide solicitation. More than two dozen applications were received and, after due deliberation, the RCI Oversight Committee selected five curation-intensive projects. These projects were chosen based on a number of criteria, including how they represented campus research, varieties of topics, researcher engagement, and the various services required. The pilot process began in September 2011, and will be completed in early 2014. Extensive lessons learned from the pilots are being compiled and are being used in the on-going design and implementation of the permanent Research Data Curation Program in the UC San Diego Library. In this paper, we present specific implementation details of these various services, as well as lessons learned. The program focused on many aspects of contemporary scholarship, including data creation and storage, description and metadata creation, citation and publication, and long term preservation and access. Based on the lessons learned in our processes, the Research Data Curation Program will provide a suite of services from which campus users can pick and choose, as necessary. The program will provide support for the data management requirements from national funding agencies.