IASSIST Quarterly (Journal)
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ReprohackNL 2019: how libraries can promote research reproducibility through community engagement
Full text linkUniversity Libraries play a crucial role in moving towards Open Science, contributing to more transparent, reproducible and reusable research. The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University (LU) library is a scholarly lab that promotes open science literacy among Leiden’s scholars by two complementary strategies: existing top-down structures are used to provide training and services, while bottom-up initiatives from the research community are actively supported by offering the CDS’s expertise and facilities. An example of how bottom-up initiatives can blossom with the help of library structures such as the CDS is ReproHack. ReproHack – a reproducibility hackathon – is a grass-root initiative by young scholars with the goal of improving research reproducibility in three ways. First, hackathon attendees learn about reproducibility tools and challenges by reproducing published results and providing feedback to authors on their attempt. Second, authors can nominate their work and receive feedback on their reproducibility efforts. Third, the collaborative atmosphere helps building a community interested in making their own research reproducible.
A first ReproHack in the Netherlands took place on November 30th, 2019, co-organised by the CDS at the LU Library with 44 participants from the fields of psychology, engineering, biomedicine, and computer science. For 19 papers, 24 feedback forms were returned and five papers were reported as successfully reproduced. Besides the researchers’ learning experience, the event led to recommendations on how to enhance research reproducibility. The ReproHack format therefore provides an opportunity for libraries to improve scientific reproducibility through community engagement
Mathematics, risk, and messy survey data
Full text linkResearch funder mandates, such as those from the U.S. National Science Foundation (2011), the Canadian Tri-Agency (draft, 2018), and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (2018) now often include requirements for data curation, including where possible data sharing in an approved archive. Data curators need to be prepared for the potential that researchers who have not previously shared data will need assistance with cleaning and depositing datasets so that they can meet these requirements and maintain funding. Data de-identification or anonymization is a major ethical concern in cases where survey data is to be shared, and one which data professionals may find themselves ill-equipped to deal with. This article is intended to provide an accessible and practical introduction to the theory and concepts behind data anonymization and risk assessment, will describe a couple of case studies that demonstrate how these methods were carried out on actual datasets requiring anonymization, and discuss some of the difficulties encountered. Much of the literature dealing with statistical risk assessment of anonymized data is abstract and aimed at computer scientists and mathematicians, while material aimed at practitioners often does not consider more recent developments in the theory of data anonymization. We hope that this article will help bridge this gap
Knowing what to do and how to do it: High transparency and careful curation of data and metadata
Full text linkWelcome to the third issue of volume 44 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 44(3) 2020).
Transparency is a prerequisite for valid analysis of data. Full disclosure of all aspects of the creation process is necessary for the evaluation of a data collection. The Roper Center has collaborated, assembled and developed standards, and performed scoring of datasets to facilitate the evaluation of data. It is easy to say that all aspects of data collection are important, but with more knowledge about the process of data curation PhD students become aware of how it is important for their research. The CESSDA Metadata Office is a tool supporting the realization of high transparency and successful research data management. This is an extremely short overview of the three submissions found in this issue, below a little more information, and finally enjoy the articles.
The first paper in this issue is first for a reason. \u27Standards and Scoring to Increase Transparency for Archived Public Opinion Data\u27 by Kathleen J. Weldon won first prize among the papers submitted for the IASSIST 2019 conference. You do remember IASSIST conferences, I hope. Annual conferences have been regular as clockwork, but due to COVID-19 the 2020 conference in Göteborg, Sweden, is postponed to April 7–9, 2021. See more at https://www.iassist2021.org/.
Kathleen J. Weldon is the Director of Data Operations and Communications at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Cornell University – the world’s largest archive of public opinion survey data. New standards for archiving data at Roper Center are described in the paper in the context of their historical development. What is now termed ‘transparency’ was an early commitment by George Gallup to \u27full disclosure of methods, sponsorship, and data\u27. After some years, standards were adopted by professional organizations. At the Roper Center, submissions have long been evaluated in order to preserve ‘the best of its time’ polling. However, with new technologies new survey methods were used without a consensus of best practices. This led to the development of standards by the National Council on Public Polls (NCPP) and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The new standards are the basis for Roper Center developing a system for scoring transparency. It is the author\u27s hope and expectation that the future will bring an increase in the preservation of well-documented polling datasets.
Many PhD students produce data collections or compile and use archival data for their thesis. At Purdue University, a School of Information Studies course was developed for PhD students covering topics such as identifying an archival data set, creating metadata and documentation, selecting an appropriate long-term storage location, and planning for the deposit process. The paper \u27Capturing their “first” dataset: A graduate course to walk PhD students through the curation of their dissertation data\u27 describes the background, the development, and the content and structure of the course, and concludes with assessments and the insights gained for the library. Naturally some practical issues evolved through the pilot course; specifically, the broad spectrum of disciplines in PhD projects demands much customization of the course curricula. The authors Megan Sapp Nelson and Ningning Nicole Kong are respectively professor and associate professor of Library Science at Purdue University Libraries. The course was established by request from PhD advisors, who found that datasets were valuable outputs not being captured in the thesis deposit process. This course also meets the demand for data management skills in the job market.
GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany and the UK Data Archive are leading the CESSDA Metadata Office project. The Metadata Office covers several areas such as metadata models, schemas, profiles, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri. The paper \u27The matter of meta in research data management: Introducing the CESSDA Metadata Office Project\u27 reports on the project. CESSDA stands for Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives, and with the many European languages it follows that language issues are the focus. The project builds upon DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) and also includes collaboration with the DDI Alliance on translations of DDI vocabularies through the use of ISO language tags in metadata and controlled vocabularies; this is exemplified in some screen shots. The paper also presents the information covered in the CESSDA Metadata Model and some examples of the characteristics of elements of the model. The authors are all participants in the project; André Förster and Kerrin Borschewski as consecutive heads of the project at GESIS, Sharon Bolton as head of the project at UK Data Service, and Taina Jääskeläinen at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author login to https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors \u27deep links\u27 into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout:
https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions
Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: [email protected]. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen - September 202
Bringing method to the madness: An example of integrating social science qualitative research methods into NVivo data analysis software training
Full text linkIt is not uncommon for researchers who wish to delve into qualitative data analysis to be lacking in qualitative methods training. Data professionals who support these aspiring qualitative researchers are well positioned to recognize and develop resources, training, and services to address this methods gap. This article describes a specific training session aimed at bridging this gap: a collaboration between a sociology professor and the author that integrates a qualitative methodological framework with specific features of NVivo qualitative data analysis software that complement and facilitate research guided by that framework. This article (1) outlines how this collaboration came to be; (2) describes the roles that the sociology professor and the author play in the collaboration, including specific examples from the training session; and (3) offers a reflection on the experience, including successes and growth possibilities going forward
Standardization and certification save us from the frustrations of the Greek drama
Full text linkWelcome to the first issue of volume 43 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 43:1, 2019).
The IASSIST Quarterly presents in this issue three papers illustrated in the title above. Chronologically we start from an early beginning. No, not with Turing, we time travel further back and experience ancient Greece. In this submission the Greek drama delivers the form, while data librarians deliver the content on data sharing. And it makes you a proud IASSISTer to know that altruism is the rationale behind data sharing. The drama continues in the second submission when librarians get frustrated because they suddenly find themselves first as data librarians and second as frustrated data librarians because ends do not meet when the librarians have difficulties servicing the data needs of their users, in combination with the users having unrealistic expectations. Finally, the third article is about standardization and certification that makes the librarians more secure that they are on the right track when building a TDR (Trustworthy Digital Repository). Enjoy the reading.
The first article is different from most articles. There is a first for everything! Not often are we at IQ offered a Greek drama. And here is one on data sharing. The article needed the layout of a play so even the typeface of this contribution is different. The paper / play is called \u27An epic journey in sharing: The story of a young researcher’s journey to share her data and the information professionals who tried to help’. The authors are Sebastian Karcher and Sophia Lafferty-Hess at Duke University Libraries. The reason for using Greek drama as a template is that form can help us think differently - \u27out of the box’! The play demonstrates the positive intention of data sharing, and by sharing contributing to something larger. The article references other researchers showing that scholarly altruism is a driving force for data sharers. No matter the good intentions of the protagonist, she finds herself locked in a situation where she is not able to take identifiable data with her when leaving the institution. And leaving the university is what undergraduates do. Without the identification, it is impossible to obtain re-consent from participants. Yes, it does look murky but there is even a happy ending in the epilogue.
The second article is about librarianship, and how that task is not always easy. \u27Frustrations and roadblocks in data reference librarianship’ is by Alicia Kubas and Jenny McBurney who work at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Like many others, they have observed that many librarians find themselves as \u27accidental data librarians\u27. That this brings frustration can be seen in the results of a survey they carried out. The methodology is explained, and descriptive statistics bring insight to what librarians do as well as to the frustrations and roadblocks they experience. Let us start with the good news: some librarians are never frustrated with data questions. The bad news is that only 3% fall into that category. On the other hand, 83% mention \u27managing patron expectations’ among their biggest frustrations. It sounds as if matching of expectations should be a course at library school. Maybe it is already, and users with high expectations simply do not understand the complexity of the work involved. Fortunately, some frustrations can be lessened by experience, but there are others – called roadblocks, e.g. paywalls or lack of geographic coverage – that all librarians meet. Among the comments after the survey was that data persist as a difficult source type for librarians to support. The questionnaire developed and used by Kubas and McBurney is found in an appendix.
The last article in this issue raises sustainability as an important issue for long term data preservation, and the concept forms part of the title of the submission \u27CoreTrustSeal: From academic collaboration to sustainable services\u27. The paper is from an international group of authors comprising Hervé L\u27Hours, Mari Kleemola, and Lisa de Leeuw from UK, Finland and the Netherlands. The seal is a certification for repositories curating data. The last sentence in the abstract sums up the content of the paper: \u27As well as providing a historical narrative and current and future perspectives, the CoreTrustSeal experience offers lessons for those involved in developing standards and best practices or seeking to develop cooperative and community-driven efforts bridging data curation activities across academic disciplines, governmental and private sectors\u27. In order to attain CoreTrustSeal TDR certification and become a Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR), the repository has to fulfil 16 requirements and the CoreTrustSeal foundation maintains these requirements and the audit procedures. The certification draws on preservation standards and models as found in Open Archival Information Systems and in the catalogues of ISO and DIN standards. The authors emphasize that the CoreTrustSeal is founded on and developed in a spirit of openness and community. The paper\u27s sharing of the experience follows that spirit.
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author login to https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors \u27deep links\u27 into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout:
https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions
Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: [email protected]. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen - May 201
Where is QDA hiding? An analysis of the discoverability of qualitative research support on academic library websites
Full text linkThis study explores the discoverability of qualitative research support services, using a purposive sample of academic library websites (n=95). These services were hard to find on most of the websites in our sample. In this paper, we outline the site characteristics that make discoverability easy or hard. Previous studies on qualitative resources at academic libraries have not addressed this topic. Our study fills this gap in the literature. Our aim is to provide information that can help libraries to improve the visibility of their resources for qualitative researchers and their students
As open as possible and as closed as needed
Full text linkWelcome to the third issue of volume 43 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 43:3, 2019).
Yes, we are open! Open data is good. Just a click away. Downloadable 24/7 for everybody. An open government would make the decisionmakers’ data open to the public and the opposition. As an example, communal data on bicycle paths could be open, so more navigation apps would flourish and embed the information in maps, which could suggest more safe bicycle routes. However, as demonstrated by all three articles in this IQ issue, very often research data include information that requires restrictions concerning data access. The second paper states that data should be ‘as open as possible and as closed as needed’. This phrase originates from a European Union Horizon 2020 project called the Open Research Data Pilot, in ‘Guidelines on FAIR Data Management in Horizon 2020’ (July 2016). Some data need to be closed and not freely available. So once more it shows that a simple solution of total openness and one-size-fits-all is not possible. We have to deal with more complicated schemes depending on the content of data. Luckily, experienced people at data institutions are capable of producing adapted solutions.
The first article ‘Restricting data’s use: A spectrum of concerns in need of flexible approaches’ describes how data producers have legitimate needs for restricting data access for users. This understanding is quite important as some users might have an automatic objection towards all restrictions on use of data. The authors Dharma Akmon and Susan Jekielek are at ICPSR at the University of Michigan. ICPSR has been the U.S. research archive since 1962, so they have much practice in long-term storage of digital information. From a short-term perspective you might think that their primary task is to get the data in use and thus would be opposed to any kind of access restrictions. However, both producers and custodians of data are very well aware of their responsibility for determining restrictions and access. The caveat concerns the potential harm through disclosure, often exemplified by personal data of identifiable individuals. The article explains how dissemination options differ in where data are accessed and what is required for access. If you are new to IASSIST, the article also gives an excellent short introduction to ICPSR and how this institution guards itself and its users against the hazards of data sharing.
In the second article ‘Managing data in cross-institutional projects’, the reader gains insight into how FAIR data usage benefits a cross-institutional project. The starting point for the authors - Zaza Nadja Lee Hansen, Filip Kruse, and Jesper Boserup Thestrup – is the FAIR principles that data should be: findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable. The authors state that this implies that the data should be as open as possible. However, as expressed in the ICPSR article above, data should at the same time be as closed as needed. Within the EU, the mention of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) will always catch the attention of the economical responsible at any institution because data breaches can now be very severely fined. The authors share their experience with implementation of the FAIR principles with data from several cross-institutional projects. The key is to ensure that from the beginning there is agreement on following the specific guidelines, standards and formats throughout the project. The issues to agree on are, among other things, storage and sharing of data and metadata, responsibilities for updating data, and deciding which data format to use. The benefits of FAIR data usage are summarized, and the article also describes the cross-institutional projects. The authors work as a senior consultant/project manager at the Danish National Archives, senior advisor at The Royal Danish Library, and communications officer at The Royal Danish Library. The cross-institutional projects mentioned here stretch from Kierkegaard’s writings to wind energy.
While this issue started by mentioning that ICPSR was founded in 1962, we end with a more recent addition to the archive world, established at Qatar University’s Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) in 2017. The paper ‘Data archiving for dissemination within a Gulf nation’ addresses the experience of this new institution in an environment of cultural and political sensitivity. With a positive view you can regard the benefits as expanding. The start is that archive staff get experience concerning policies for data selection, restrictions, security and metadata. This generates benefits and expands to the broader group of research staff where awareness and improvements relate to issues like design, collection and documentation of studies. Furthermore, data sharing can be seen as expanding in the Middle East and North Africa region and generating a general improvement in the relevance and credibility of statistics generated in the region. Again, the FAIR principles of findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable are gaining momentum and being adopted by government offices and data collection agencies. In the article, the story of SESRI at Qatar University is described ahead of sections concerning data sharing culture and challenges as well as issues of staff recruitment, architecture and workflow. Many of the observations and considerations in the article will be of value to staff at both older and infant archives. The authors of the paper are the senior researcher and lead archivist at the archive of the Qatar University Brian W. Mandikiana, and Lois Timms-Ferrara and Marc Maynard – CEO and director of technology at Data Independence (Connecticut, USA).
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author login to https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors \u27deep links\u27 into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout:
https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions
Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: [email protected]. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen - September 201
Failure as the treatment for transforming complexity to complicatedness
Full text linkWelcome to the fourth issue of volume 42 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 42:4, 2018).
The IASSIST Quarterly presents in this issue three papers. When you know how, cycling is easy. However, data for cycling infrastructure appears to be a messiness of complications, stakeholders and data producers. The exemplary lesson is that whatever your research area there are often many views and types of data possible for your research. And the fuller view does not make your research easier, but it does make it better. The term geospatial data covers many different types of data, and as such presents problems for building access points or portals for these data. The second paper also brings experiences with complicated data, now with a focus on data management and curation. I would say that the third paper on software development in digital humanities is also about complicatedness, but this time the complicatedness was not overcome. Maybe here complexity is a better choice of word than complicatedness. In my book things are complex until we have solved how to deal with them; after that they are only complicated. The word failure is even among the keywords selected for this entry. Again: Read and learn. You might learn more from failure than from success. I find that Sir Winston Churchill is always at hand to keep up the good spirit: ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’.
From Canada comes the paper ‘Cycling Infrastructure in the Ottawa-Gatineau Area: A Complex Assemblage of Data’ that some readers might have seen in the form of a poster at the IASSIST 2018 conference in Montreal. The authors are Sylvie Lafortune, Social Sciences Librarian at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Joël Rivard, Geography and GIS Librarian at the University of Ottawa. The article is a commendable example of how to encompass and illuminate an area of research not only though data but also by including the data producers and stakeholders, and the relationships between them. The article is based upon a study conducted in 2017-2018 that explored the data story behind the cycling infrastructure in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city; or to be precise, the infrastructure of the cycling network of over 1,000 km which spans both sides of the Ontario and Quebec provincial boundary known as the Ottawa-Gatineau National Capital Region. The municipalities invest in cycling infrastructure including expanded and improved bike lanes and paths, traffic calming measures, parking facilities, bike-transit integration, bike sharing and training programs to promote cycling and increased cycling safety. The research included many types of data among which were data from telephone interviews concerning ‘who, where, why, when, and how’ in an Origin-Destination survey, data generated by mobile apps tracking fitness activities, collision data, and bike counters placed in the area. The study shows how a narrow subject topic such as cycling infrastructure is embedded in complicated data and many relationships.
Ningning Nicole Kong is the author of ‘One Store has All? – the Backend Story of Managing Geospatial Information Toward an Easy Discovery’. Many libraries are handling geographical information and my shortened version of the abstract from the article promises: GeoBlacklight and OpenGeoportal are two open-source projects that initiated from academic institutions, which have been adopted by many universities and libraries for geospatial data discovery. The paper provides a summary of geospatial data management strategies by reviewing related projects, and focuses on best management practices when curating geospatial data. The paper starts with a historical introduction to geospatial datasets in academic libraries in the United States and also presents the complicatedness involved in geospatial data. The paper mentions geoportals and related projects in both the United States and Europe with a focus on OpenGeoportal. Nicole Kong is an assistant professor and GIS specialist at Purdue University Libraries.
Sophie 1.0 was an attempt to create a multimedia editing, reading, and publishing platform. Based at the University of Southern California with national and international collaboration, Sophie 2.0 was a project to rewrite Sophie 1.0 in the Java programming language. The author Jasmine S. Kirby gives the rationale for the article ‘How NOT to Create a Digital Media Scholarship Platform: The History of the Sophie 2.0 Project’ in the sentence: ‘Understanding what went wrong with Sophie 2.0 can help us understand how to create better digital media scholarship tools’. For the first time we now have failure among the keywords used for a paper in IQ. The Institute of the Future of the Book (IFB) was a central collaborator in the development of the Sophie versions. The IFB describes itself as a think-and-do tank and it is doing many projects. The Kirby paper gives us a brief insight into the future of reading, starting from basic e-books in the 1960s. When you read through the article you will note caveats like lack of focus on usability and changing of the underneath software language. The article ends with good questions for evaluating digital scholarship tools.
Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author login to https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors \u27deep links\u27 into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout:
https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions
Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: [email protected]. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you.
Karsten Boye Rasmussen - February 201
Calendar; 1983 Annual Conference Preliminary Program; and Book Reviews
No full text  
CoreTrustSeal: From academic collaboration to sustainable services
Full text linkNational and international digital repositories must design and deliver sustainable services as a foundation for a range of scientific and data management infrastructures while reducing costs and avoiding duplication of effort. The CoreTrustSeal, launched in 2017, defines requirements and offers core level certification for Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDR) holding data for long-term preservation. This paper traces the journey of the CoreTrustSeal through the Data Seal of Approval (DSA), ICSU World Data System (WDS), Research Data Alliance (RDA) working groups, and community engagement, towards becoming a sustainable service supporting global data infrastructure. We outline the design and delivery of the service, current activities, the benefits of certification to a range of communities, and future plans and challenges. As well as providing a historical narrative and current and future perspectives the CoreTrustSeal experience offers lessons for those developing standards and best practices, or seeking to develop cooperative and community-driven efforts which bridge data curation across academic disciplines and the governmental and private sectors