International Journal of Digital Curation
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Data Practices in Digital History
Full text linkThis paper presents an exploratory research project that investigates data practices in digital history research. Emerging from the 1950s and ‘60s in the United States, digital history remains a charged topic among historians, requiring a new research paradigm that includes new concepts and methodologies, an intensive degree of interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and international collaboration, and experimental forms of research sharing, publishing, and evaluation. Using mixed methods of interviews and questionnaire, we identified data challenges in digital history research practices from three perspectives: ontology (e.g., the notion of data in historical research); workflow (e.g., data collection, processing, preservation, presentation and sharing); and challenges. Extending from the results, we also provide a critical discussion of the state-of-art in digital history research, particularly in respect of metadata, data sharing, digital history training, collaboration, as well as the transformation of librarians’ roles in digital history projects. We conclude with provisional recommendations of better data practices for participants in digital history, from the perspective of library and information science
Identifying Opportunities for Collective Curation During Archaeological Excavations
Full text linkArchaeological excavations are comprised of interdisciplinary teams that create, manage, and share data as they unearth and analyse material culture. These team-based settings are ripe for collective curation during these data lifecycle stages. However, findings from four excavation sites show that the data interdisciplinary teams create are not well integrated. Knowing this, we recommended opportunities for collective curation to improve use and reuse of the data within and outside of the team
Inter-Organisational Coordination Work in Digital Curation: the Case of Eurobarometer
Full text linkOpen research is predicated upon seamless access to curated research data. Major national and European funding schemes, such as Horizon Europe, strongly encourage or require publicly funded data to be FAIR - that is, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (Wilkinson, 2016). What underpins such initiatives are the many data organizations and repositories working with their stakeholders and each other to establish policies and practices, implement them, and do the curatorial work to increase the available, discoverability, and accessibility of high quality research data. However, such work has often been invisible and underfunded, necessitating creative and collaborative solutions.
In this paper, we briefly describe how one such case from social science data: the processing of the Eurobarometer data set. Using content analysis of administrative documents and interviews, we detail how European data archives managed the tensions of curatorial work across borders and jurisdictions from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, the challenges that they faced in distributing work, and the solutions they found. In particular, we look at the interactions of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and social science data organizations (DO) like UKDA, ICPSR, and GESIS and the institutional and organizational collaborations that made Eurobarometer “too big to fail”. We describe some of the invisible work that they underwent in the past in making data in Europe findable, accessible, interoperable, and conclude with implications for “frictionless” data access and reuse today.
 
Tool Selection Among Qualitative Data Reusers
Full text linkThis paper explores the tension between the tools that data reusers in the field of education prefer to use when working with qualitative video data and the tools that repositories make available to data reusers. Findings from this mixed-methods study show that data reusers utilizing qualitative video data did not use repository-based tools. Rather, they valued common, widely available tools that were collaborative and easy to use.
 
Research Data Management (RDM) at the University of Ghana (UG): Myth or Reality?
Full text linkThis article explores Research Data Management (RDM) at the University of Ghana (UG). It emphasises on institutional awareness and attitudes, and whether the University Library is officially supporting this emerging strategic interest in research focused Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Purposive sampling was used to select information-rich respondents from across the University (i.e. Librarians, Research Administrators, ICT Managers and Senior Researchers) who were interviewed on a range of issues about RDM. Institutional documents were also reviewed to corroborate the primary data and get a deeper understanding of the research problem. The study shows that while RDM is recognised at the institutional level as good research practice and integrity issue, the concept is tenuously understood in the local community. Unsurprisingly, however, there was a general appreciation and awareness of the need for RDM and the implications for such critical concerns as security, integrity, continuity and institutional reputation. The library is yet to take a strategic approach to RDM issues and there is clearly a dearth in RDM expertise within the library system. The study recommends that the library must be proactive in advocating and promoting RDM issues at UG, but first, the Librarians must take advantage of numerous existing opportunities to build their capacity.
 
Research Data Management Policy and Practice in China
Full text linkOn April 2, 2018, the State Council of China formally released a national research data management (RDM) policy “Measures for Managing Scientific Data”. Literature review shows that university libraries have played an important role in supporting Research Data Management at an institutional level in countries in North America, Europe and Australasia. The aim of this paper is to capture the current status of RDM in Chinese universities, in particular how university libraries have involved in taking the agenda forward.
This paper uses mixed methods: a website analysis of university policies and services; a questionnaire for university librarians; and semi-structured interviews. Findings from website analysis and questionnaires indicate that RDS at a local level in Chinese Universities are in their infancy. On the whole there is more evidence of activity in developing data repositories than support services. Despite the existence of a national policy there remain significant barriers to further service development, such as the lag in the creation of local policy, insufficient funding for technical infrastructure, shortages of staff skills in data curation, and language barriers to international data sharing and open science. RDS in Chinese university libraries are still lagging behind the English-speaking countries and Europe
Mutually Assured Preservation: Fostering Active Preservation Practice through Fire Drills
Full text linkSound preservation practice is a series of active engagements with the content one hopes to preserve. In many cases, this has not always been the case. Both institutions and services—while not actively encouraging passive preservation—neglect the key components in the stewardship of our historical record. In other words, there is much more to preservation than simply choosing a storage solution and placing one’s content there. The materials need to be verified, checked, and tested against expectations within the service. This is accepted practice for many. However, very few services provide the necessary assurance to test both its own user expectations as well as the depositors’ themselves. Creating a methodology for both depositor and service to be assured that preservation meets expectations is critical. This is happening in very select ways. This paper discusses one such dialogue and its function.
 
Sustaining Digital Humanities Collections: Challenges and Community-Centred Strategies
Full text linkSince the advent of digital scholarship in the humanities, decades of extensive, distributed scholarly efforts have produced a digital scholarly record that is increasingly scattered, heterogeneous, and independent of curatorial institutions. Digital scholarship produces collections with unique scholarly and cultural value—collections that serve as hubs for collaboration and communication, engage broad audiences, and support new research. Yet, lacking systematic support for digital scholarship in libraries, digital humanities collections are facing a widespread crisis of sustainability. This paper provides outcomes of a multimodal study of sustainability challenges confronting digital collections in the humanities, characterizing institutional and community-oriented strategies for sustaining collections. Strategies that prioritize community engagement with collections and the maintenance of sociotechnical workflows suggest possibilities for novel approaches to collaborative, community-centred sustainability for digital humanities collections
Design and Implementation of the first Generic Archive Storage Service for Research Data in Germany
Full text linkResearch data as the true valuable good in science must be saved and subsequently kept findable, accessible and reusable for reasons of proper scientific conduct for a time span of several years. However, managing long-term storage of research data is a burden for institutes and researchers. Because of the sheer size and the required retention time apt storage providers are hard to find.
Aiming to solve this puzzle, the bwDataArchive project started development of a long-term research data archive that is reliable, cost effective and able store multiple petabytes of data. The hardware consists of data storage on magnetic tape, interfaced with disk caches and nodes for data movement and access. On the software side, the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) was chosen for its proven ability to reliably store huge amounts of data. However, the implementation of bwDataArchive is not dependant on HPSS. For authentication the bwDataArchive is integrated into the federated identity management for educational institutions in the State of Baden-Württemberg in Germany.
The archive features data protection by means of a dual copy at two distinct locations on different tape technologies, data accessibility by common storage protocols, data retention assurance for more than ten years, data preservation with checksums, and data management capabilities supported by a flexible directory structure allowing sharing and publication. As of September 2019, the bwDataArchive holds over 9 PB and 90 million files and sees a constant increase in usage and users from many communities
The Red Queen in the Repository
Full text linkOne of the grand curation challenges is to secure metadata quality in the ever-changing environment of metadata standards and file formats. As the Red Queen tells Alice in Through the Looking-Glass: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” That is, there is some “running” needed to keep metadata records in a research data repository fit for long-term use and put in place. One of the main tools of adaptation and keeping pace with the evolution of new standards, formats – and versions of standards in this ever-changing environment are validation schemas. Validation schemas are mainly seen as methods of checking data quality and fitness for use, but are also important for long-term preservation. We might like to think that our present (meta)data standards and formats are made for eternity, but in reality we know that standards evolve, formats change (some even become obsolete with time), and so do our needs for storage, searching and future dissemination for re-use. Eventually, we come to a point where transformation of our archival records and migration to other formats will be necessary. This could also mean that even if the AIPs, the Archival Information Packages stay the same in storage, the DIPs, the Dissemination Information Packages that we want to extract from the archive are subject to change of format. Further, in order for archival information packages to be self-sustainable, as required in the OAIS model, it is important to take interdependencies between individual files in the information packages into account. This should be done already by the time of ingest and validation of the SIPs, the Submission Information Packages, and along the line at different points of necessary transformation/migration (from SIP to AIP, from AIP to DIP etc.), in order to counter obsolescence.
This paper investigates possible validation errors and missing elements in metadata records from three general purpose, multidisciplinary research data repositories – Figshare, Harvard’s Dataverse and Zenodo, and explores the potential effects of these errors on future transformation to AIPs and migration to other formats within a digital archive.