International Journal of Digital Curation
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Recovery of heritage software stored on magnetic tape for Commodore microcomputers
Get PDFDigital games make up a significant but little known chapter in the history of the moving image in Australia and New Zealand. Beginning in the early 1980s, the Australasian software industry developed a remarkable record of content creation. The ``Play It Again\u27\u27 project is conducting research into the largely unknown histories of 1980s game development in Australia and New Zealand, ensuring that local titles make it into national collections and are documented and preserved, enabling the public to once again play these games. Microcomputers from the 1980s made extensive use of compact audio cassettes to distribute software as an inexpensive alternative to the floppy disk technology available at the time. Media from this era are at risk of degradation and are rapidly approaching the end of their lifespan. As hardware platforms and peripheral devices become obsolete, access to the data for future scholars and other interested parties becomes more difficult. In this article, we present a case study, wherein we investigate the issues involved in making digital copies with a view to the long term preservation of these software artefacts. A video game title stored on standard compact cassette for Commodore\u27s popular VIC-20 machine, ``Dinky Kong\u27\u27 by Mark Sibley was recorded using both inexpensive amateur and professional playback equipment. The audio files obtained were processed using freely available software, alongside a customised decoder written in MATLAB and Perl. The resulting image files were found to be playable using an emulator. More importantly, the integrity of the data itself was verified, by making use of error detection features inbuilt to the Commodore tape format, which is described in detail. Issues influencing the quality of the recovered image files such as the bit rate of the digital recording are discussed. The phenomenon of audio dropout on magnetic tape is shown be of some concern, however there exist signal processing techniques to compensate for such errors. The end result of the imaging process was a file compatible with a popular Commodore VIC-20 emulator, the integrity of which was verified by using inbuilt checksums
Formalizing an Attribution Framework for Scientific Data/Software Products and Collections
Get PDFAs scientific research and development become more collaborative, the diversity of skills and expertise involved in producing scientific data are expanding as well. Since recognition of contribution has significant academic and professional impact for participants in scientific projects, it is important to integrate attribution and acknowledgement of scientific contributions into the research and data lifecycle. However, defining and clarifying contributions and the relationship of specific individuals and organizations can be challenging, especially when balancing the needs and interests of diverse partners. Designing an implementation method for attributing scientific contributions within complex projects that can allow ease of use and integration with existing documentation formats is another crucial consideration. To provide a versatile mechanism for organizing, documenting, and storing contributions to different types of scientific projects and their related products, an attribution and acknowledgement matrix and XML schema have been created as part of the Attribution and Acknowledgement Content Framework (AACF). Leveraging the taxonomies of contribution roles and types that have been developed and published previously, the authors consolidated 16 contribution types that could be considered and used when accrediting team member’s contributions. Using these contribution types, specific information regarding the contributing organizations and individuals can be documented using the AACF. This paper provides the background and motivations for creating the current version of the AACF Matrix and Schema, followed by demonstrations of the process and the results of using the Matrix and the Schema to record the contribution information of different sample datasets. The paper concludes by highlighting the key feedback and features to be examined in order to improve the next revisions of the Matrix and the Schema.Â
DataCite: Lessons Learned on Persistent Identifiers for Research Data
Get PDFData are the infrastructure of science and they serve as the groundwork for scientific pursuits. Data publication has emerged as a game-changing breakthrough in scholarly communication. Data form the outputs of research but also are a gateway to new hypotheses, enabling new scientific insights and driving innovation. And yet stakeholders across the scholarly ecosystem, including practitioners, institutions, and funders of scientific research are increasingly concerned about the lack of sharing and reuse of research data. Across disciplines and countries, researchers, funders, and publishers are pushing for a more effective research environment, minimizing the duplication of work and maximizing the interaction between researchers. Availability, discoverability, and reproducibility of research outputs are key factors to support data reuse and make possible this new environment of highly collaborative research. An interoperable e-infrastructure is imperative in order to develop new platforms and services for to data publication and reuse. DataCite has been working to establish and promote methods to locate, identify and share information about research data. Along with service development, DataCite supports and advocates for the standards behind persistent identifiers (in particular DOIs, Digital Object Identifiers) for data and other research outputs. Persistent identifiers allow different platforms to exchange information consistently and unambiguously and provide a reliable way to track citations and reuse. Because of this, data publication can become a reality from a technical standpoint, but the adoption of data publication and data citation as a practice by researchers is still in its early stages. Since 2009, DataCite has been developing a series of tools and services to foster the adoption of data publication and citation among the research community. Through the years, DataCite has worked in a close collaboration with interdisciplinary partners on these issues and we have gained insight into the development of data publication workflows. This paper describes the types of different actions and the lessons learned by DataCite.Â
Amplifying Data Curation Efforts to Improve the Quality of Life Science Data
Get PDFIn the era of data science, datasets are shared widely and used for many purposes unforeseen by the original creators of the data.  In  this context, defects in datasets can have far reaching consequences,  spreading from dataset to dataset, and affecting the consumers of  data in ways that are hard to predict or quantify.  Some form of waste  is often the result.  For example,  scientists using defective data to propose hypotheses for experimentation may waste their limited wet lab resources chasing the wrong experimental targets.  Scarce drug trial resources may be used to test drugs that actually have little chance of giving a cure.  Because of the potential real world costs, database owners care about providing high quality data. Automated curation tools can be used to an extent to discover and correct some forms of defect. However, in some areas human curation, performed by highly-trained domain experts, is needed to ensure that the data represents our current interpretation of reality accurately. Human curators are expensive, and there is far more curation work to be done than there are curators available to perform it. Tools and techniques are needed to enable the full value to be obtained from the curation effort currently available. In this paper,we explore one possible approach to maximising the  value obtained from human curators, by automatically extracting information about data defects and corrections from the work that the curators do. This information is packaged in a source independent form, to allow it to be used by the owners of other databases (for which human curation effort is not available or is insufficient).  This amplifies the efforts of the human curators, allowing their work to be applied to other sources, without requiring any additional effort or  change in their processes or tool sets. We show that this approach can discover significant numbers of defects, which can also be found in other sources
Reuse for Research: Curating Astrophysical Datasets for Future Researchers
Get PDF“Our data are going to be valuable for science for the next 50 years, so please make sure you preserve them and keep them accessible for active research for at least that period.”
These were approximately the words used by the principal investigator of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC) when he presented our task to us. The data in question consists of data products produced by KASC researchers and working groups as part of their research, as well as underlying data imported from the NASA archives.
The overall requirements for 50 years of preservation while, at the same time, enabling reuse of the data for active research presented a number of specific challenges, closely intertwining data handling and data infrastructure with scientific issues. This paper reports our work to deliver the best possible solution, performed in close cooperation between the research team and library personnel
Citations for Software: Providing Identification, Access and Recognition for Research Software
Get PDFSoftware plays a significant role in modern academic research, yet lacks a similarly significant presence in the scholarly record. With increasing interest in promoting reproducible research, curating software as a scholarly resource not only promotes access to these tools, but also provides recognition for the intellectual efforts that go into their development. This work reviews existing standards for identifying, promoting discovery of, and providing credit for software development work. In addition, it shows how these guidelines have been integrated into existing tools and community cultures, and provides recommendations for future software curation efforts.Â
Into the Contact Zone: A reflective evaluation of open online digital curation education
No full textThis article focuses on two UK based online courses in the field of digital curation and preservation; Introduction to Digital Curation, run by University College London, and The Beginner’s Guide to the OAIS Reference Model Course, run by the University of London Computer Centre. The courses are considered not against the frame of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as a revolutionary force in education, but against the metaphor of the ‘contact zone’ (adopted from the work of Costis Dallas (2015)), as part of the ongoing development and establishment of digital curation as a field of study. Two dimensions of difference are examined; firstly that between face to face and online learning, and secondly that between different groups of learners (such as current professionals and future professionals). Â It concludes that open online education is best seen as a contact zone less in the sense of being the teaching of a professional field of practice and more in the sense of advocacy and the provision of informative resources and enlightening experiences that pique the interest, increase awareness and most of all, make contact
Introducing Safe Access to Sensitive Data at the University of Bristol
Get PDFThe economic and societal benefits of making research data available for reuse and verification are now widely understood and accepted. However, there are some research studies, particularly those involving human participants, which face particular challenges in making their data openly available due to the sensitivities of the data. Despite its potential value to society this material is invariably kept locked away due to concerns over its inappropriate disclosure. The University of Bristol’s Research Data Service has developed the institutional infrastructure, including policies and procedures, required to safely grant access to sensitive research data in a way that is transparent, secure, sustainable and crucially, replicable by other institutions.
This paper looks at the background and challenges faced by the institution in dealing with sensitive data, outlines the approach taken and some of the outstanding issues to be tackled.
This paper looks at the background and challenges faced by the institution in dealing with sensitive data, outlines the approach taken and some of the outstanding issues to be tackled
Encouraging and Facilitating Laboratory Scientists to Curate at Source
Get PDFComputers and computation have become essential to scientific activity and significant amounts of data are now captured digitally or even “born digital”. Consequently, there is more and more incentive to capture the full experiment records using digital tools, such as Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs), to enable the effective linking and publication of experiment design and methods with the digital data that is generated as a result. Inclusion of metadata for experiment records helps with providing access, effective curation, improving search, and providing context, and further enables effective sharing, collaboration, and reuse.
Regrettably, just providing researchers with the facility to add metadata to their experiment records does not mean that they will make use of it, or if they do, that the metadata they add will be relevant and useful. Our research has clearly indicated that researchers need support and tools to encourage them to create effective metadata. Tools, such as ELNs, provide an opportunity to encourage researchers to curate their records during their creation, but can also add extra value, by making use of the metadata that is generated to provide capabilities for research management and Open Science that extend far beyond what is possible with paper notebooks.
The Southampton Chemical Information group, has, for over fifteen years, investigated the use of the Web and other tools for the collection, curation, dissemination, reuse, and exploitation of scientific data and information. As part of this activity we have developed a number of ELNs, but a primary concern has been how best to ensure that the future development of such tools is both usable and useful to researchers and their communities, with a focus on curation at source. In this paper, we describe a number of user research and user studies to help answer questions about how our community makes use of tools and how we can better facilitate the capture and curation of experiment records and the related resources
Information Integration for Machine Actionable Data Management Plans
Get PDFData management plans are free-form text documents describing the data used and produced in scientific experiments. The complexity of data-driven experiments requires precise descriptions of tools and datasets used in computations to enable their reproducibility and reuse. Data management plans fall short of these requirements. In this paper, we propose machine-actionable data management plans that cover the same themes as standard data management plans, but particular sections are filled with information obtained from existing tools. We present mapping of tools from the domains of digital preservation, reproducible research, open science, and data repositories to data management plan sections. Thus, we identify the requirements for a good solution and identify its limitations. We also propose a machine-actionable data model that enables information integration. The model uses ontologies and is based on existing standards