International Journal of Digital Curation
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Research Data Management in a Cultural Heritage Organisation
Full text linkResearch is a core function of cultural heritage organisations. Inevitably, the undertaking of research by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the GLAM sector) leads to the creation of vast quantities of research data. Yet despite growing recognition that research data must be managed if it is to be exploited effectively, and in spite of increasing understanding of research data management practices and needs, particularly in the higher education sector, knowledge of research data management in cultural heritage organisations remains extremely limited. This paper represents an attempt to address the limited awareness of research data management in the cultural heritage sector. It presents the results of a data management audit conducted at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) in 2018. The study reveals that research data management at HRP is underdeveloped, while highlighting some causes for optimism. The results of the study are compared to the results of similar studies conducted in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), highlighting the many discrepancies in the ways that research data is managed at HRP and in the HE sector. Recognition of these differences and similarities, it is argued, is necessary for the development of better research data management practices and tools for the heritage sector
Building an Aotearoa New Zealand-wide Digital Curation Community of Practice
Full text linkHow do you build awareness and capability for digital curation knowledge and experience across a country? The National Library of New Zealand has a statutory role in supporting and advancing the work of Aotearoa New Zealand libraries to ensure documentary heritage and taonga is collected and preserved across the country’s memory system. This role includes supporting the collecting and curation of born-digital content. Aotearoa New Zealand’s Gallery Library Archive Museum (GLAM) sector is small but varied and diverse, so requires a flexible and adaptive plan to grow experience and capability in this area. This paper will describe the background research undertaken to gain a better understanding of the current environment, describe the development and delivery of pilot training in managing born-digital archival content, and outline our next steps. Driving this effort has been two foundational principles: 1) theory and practice are always in conversation with each other and practical hands-on experience is as important as theoretical knowledge and understanding; and 2) the work of growing capability should be done in a spirt of collaboration and partnership, meeting each other as equals and learning from each other
Towards Continuous Quality Control for Spoken Language Corpora
Full text linkThis paper describes the development of a systematic approach to the creation, management and curation of linguistic resources, particularly spoken language corpora. It also presents first steps towards a framework for continuous quality control to be used within external research projects by non-technical users, and discuss various domain and discipline specific problems and individual solutions. The creation of spoken language corpora is not only a time-consuming and costly process, but the created resources often represent intangible cultural heritage, containing recordings of, for example, extinct languages or historical events. Since high quality resources are needed to enable re-use in as many future contexts as possible, researchers need to be provided with the necessary means for quality control. We believe that this includes methods and tools adapted to Humanities researchers as non-technical users, and that these methods and tools need to be developed to support existing tasks and goals of research projects
Data Sources and Persistent Identifiers in the Open Science Research Graph of OpenAIRE
Full text linkIn this article, we give an overview of the data source typologies used in OpenAIRE and provide an outline on the role of persistent identifiers in the aggregation, curation and provision workflows that lead to the generation of the Research Graph in OpenAIRE
Digital Curation Education at the Universities of Ibadan and Liverpool: Benchmarking Using the DigCurV Curriculum Framework
Full text linkThis article presents the findings of the Ibadan/Liverpool Digital Curation Curriculum Review Project, a research project conducted to formally benchmark the teaching of digital curation in the archival education programmes at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. It provides background to the history and establishment of both universities and the development of their archives curricula. A matrix was developed using the DigCurV Curriculum Framework to assess whether digital curation skills and knowledge outlined in the framework are being taught, practised and tested in the Master’s programmes. These skills and knowledge were assessed according to the four domains outlined in DigCurV: Knowledge and Intellectual Abilities (KIA), Personal Qualities (PQ), Professional Conduct (PC), and Management and Quality Assurance (MQA), to levels appropriate to practitioners and managers. The exercise identified skill and knowledge areas where teaching materials could be shared between the universities, and areas where new materials are needed
The Administrative Load of Sharing Sensitive Data - Challenges and Solutions?
Full text linkSharing data openly has become a straightforward process at the University of Bristol. The University’s top funders mandate or recommend data sharing as a condition of funding, and many publishers require access to research data to enable results of published articles to be verified. The University has provided a dedicated data repository to support this since 2015, and demand for open publication has risen steadily since its inception. However, an increasing number of requests for sharing data relate to data that has ethical, legal or commercial sensitivities and so cannot be published openly.
Rather than discuss the wide-ranging ethical implications of data sharing, this practice paper will focus on the secure sharing of sensitive data that has ethical approval and, where required, has the necessary consent in place, from the perspective of an institution that has already decided to undertake the work inherent in sharing sensitive data. The specific purpose is to detail the workflow and administrative tasks integral in this and to highlight the types of challenges encountered
Identifying Topical Coverages of Curricula using Topic Modeling and Visualization Techniques: A Case of Digital and Data Curation
Full text linkDigital/data curation curricula have been around for a couple of decades. Currently, several ALA-accredited LIS programs offer digital/data curation courses and certificate programs to address the high demand for professionals with the knowledge and skills to handle digital content and research data in an ever-changing information environment. In this study, we aimed to examine the topical scopes of digital/data curation curricula in the context of the LIS field. We collected 16 syllabi from the digital/data curation courses, as well as textual descriptions of the 11 programs and their core courses offered in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. The collected data were analyzed using a probabilistic topic modeling technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to identify both common and unique topics. The results are the identification of 20 topics both at the program- and course-levels. Comparison between the program- and course-level topics uncovered a set of unique topics, and a number of common topics. Furthermore, we provide interactive visualizations for digital/data curation programs and courses for further analysis of topical distributions. We believe that our combined approach of a topic modeling and visualizations may provide insight for identifying emerging trends and co-occurrences of topics among digital/data curation curricula in the LIS field
Developing a Data Management Consultation Service for Faculty Researchers: a Case Study from a Large Midwestern Public University
Full text linkTo inform the development of data management services, a library research team at Kent State University conducted a survey of all tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty about their data management practices and perceptions. The methodology and results will be presented in the article, as well as how this information was used to inform future work in the library’s internal working group. Recommendations will be presented that other academic libraries could model in order to develop similar services at their institutions. Personal anecdotes are included that help ascertain current practices and sentiments around research data from the perspective of the researcher. The article addresses the particular needs of a large Midwestern U.S. academic campus, which are not currently reflected in literature on the topic
Tiny Data: Building a Community of Practice around Humanities Datasets
Full text linkQuantitative data, the foundation of scientific research, have been in the foreground of discussions about data creation, curation, and publication pipelines. However, data for humanistic and social scientific inquiries take many forms, including physical and ephemeral primary resources (books, objects, performances, interactions); qualitative, free-form observations; as well as quantitative, structured data and metadata. At the Vanderbilt University Jean and Alexander Heard Library, we started the Tiny Data Working Group (TDWG) in 2016 to tackle some of the humanistic research data creation and curation issues in a constructive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary format. The present paper considers what it means to be FAIR with humanities data, as well as how to build a community of data-literate humanists, based on our experiences with the TDWG
National Research Infrastructure - Funder or Partner?
Full text linkSince 2009 the Australian National Data Services (ANDS) has evolved and matured as a national infrastructure project. This has involved a change in its engagement model; primarily moving from a compliance and milestone driven model, towards a partnering organisation. In 2013 ANDS streamlined its contract management and reporting process and initiated the Institutional Engagement program to assist partnering organisations achieve their research data ambitions. These, amongst other initiatives, helped ANDS move towards operating as a collaborator and partner, rather than solely as a funder.
Between 2013 and 2017 ANDS changed its engagement model during four of its funding programs by offering funding and expertise into projects. However, the uptake of expertise was not as successful in the earlier programs as anticipated. As a result, changes in how ANDS engaged, including working more closely with project partners at the project initiation stage, were introduced. These changes improved ANDS’ ability to become embedded as a trusted and invested partner in the project team. Feedback provided by project partners during surveys and interviews suggests the shift from funder to partner is slowly evolving and moving in the right direction. To continue this process, ANDS, RDS and Nectar have adopted a Partnership Strategy as part of delivering its aligned business plan in 2018