International Journal of Digital Curation
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Starting with the Digital Doesn’t Make it Easier: Developing Transparent Born Digital Acquisition Policies for Archives
No full text As organizations continue to overwhelmingly abandon all forms of paper-based record keeping, libraries are still adapting to increased offers of born digital archival donations. Simple misunderstandings or disconnects between the units facilitating donations and maintaining born-digital collections creates pain-points for donor relations and can result in a lack of transparency over how their records may be processed. To facilitate better donor transparency and cross-area collaboration over born digital records, Special Collections and archives need comprehensive policies and shifts in training and collaboration paradigms. This paper analyses the intersections of born digital archiving, collection development polices, donor relations, human-supported AI tools, and digital records education within American academic libraries to propose a functional toolkit for born digital acquisitions. Unrealistic expectations of collection processing, retention, growth, and publication onto openly accessible platforms can quickly overwhelm a libraries’ digital collections’ team due to size, need for digital forensics work, copyright limitations, or other capacity-related issues. Intertwined within this discussion is an additional discourse over the need to carefully curate our digital spaces not only for practical cost reasons, but due to the environmental costs of massive data storage solutions. Through an analysis of the elements stated above, the paper will reflect on the need to integrate born digital materials into archival acquisition procedures and provide practical solutions to meet this need. 
ESRC Research Data Policy in a Changing Landscape
No full textThe Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s largest funder of economic, social, behavioural, and human data science. ESRC research data policy is ‘intended to support ESRC grant holders who collect, produce and re-use data by defining researchers’ roles and responsibilities, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the ESRC and its data service providers.’ This paper reports on an independent review of this policy, commissioned and funded by the ESRC, and carried out by the authors, to make recommendations for an updated policy in the light of changes to both the data and legal/policy landscape. Following an initial scoping review, the study comprised an online survey of stakeholder views that was followed up by a series of focus groups, and an analysis of a sample of data management plans (DMPs). In this brief report, we concentrate on those aspects of our review, both in process and in substance, which are of most relevance to the data curation and data management community, and outline the next steps in the policy review process
Data Management Plans: a Resource to Shape Institutional Data Management Services
No full textAt KU Leuven, a university in the Flemish region of Belgium, data management plans have become an important resource to drive and shape the development of data management support, services, and training. With 8,000 researchers and 7,000 PhD students in fundamental and applied research across a comprehensive range of disciplines, KU Leuven is the largest university in Belgium. Public research funding is provided by the federal and regional governments, mainly via the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and via research funding allocated to universities based on excellence criteria through the Special Research Fund (BOF) and the Industrial Research Fund (IOF).
Since 2018, FWO and BOF-IOF incorporated data management into their policies, requiring researchers to submit Data Management Plans (DMPs) to their institutional research office. Since then, the number of DMPs that are developed each year has increased exponentially, from 150 in 2018 to nearly 700 per year now. The Research Coordination Office at KU Leuven decided to review all DMPs to provide feedback to ensure high-quality plans. To manage the submission, monitoring, review, and preservation of this volume of DMPs efficiently, an online platform was developed that is integrated with the university’s research information systems.
Initially, the focus of the DMP review was on supporting the development of DMPs, as this was a new concept for researchers. The review process has significantly improved the quality of DMPs. Later, support shifted to provide advice on best practices in data management. Reviews of over 2600 DMPs provide a rich source of information to develop services and training. Based on findings from DMP reviews, the IT department developed an interactive storage guide; ethical and legal compliance in research projects can be monitored; new data management training modules are developed; and a collection of example DMPs has been developed. In addition, the growing DMP collection is a rich source of information on researchers’ data practices, providing the baseline information to develop further services. Future plans include implementing artificial intelligence in DMP reviews to automate problem detection and exploring machine-actionable DMPs for an institutional data register
An Exploration of the Functionality and Usability of Open Research Platforms to Support Open Science
No full textThis paper examines the user experience and functionality of four open research platforms - Zenodo, Figshare, OSF, and Authorea - to assess their utility in disseminating research outputs that are varied in form as well as academic discipline, and in facilitating collaboration on larger projects by multi-institutional groups. The researchers analysed the platforms’ community features, record creation processes (including metadata fields), search functionality, and analytics capabilities
Volumetric Video: Preservation and Curation Challenges of an Emerging Medium
No full textVolumetric video is an emerging media format that uses multiple cameras to record live-action subjects and produce three-dimensional, time-based digital media. The resulting digital objects encode visual and spatial information, colour, textures, and sound in a format that allows for users to view the subject from any angle and use the assets in video games, virtual reality, augmented reality, or films. The technology has been pioneered by Hollywood production companies but is now being experimented with by digital humanities scholars. As it becomes more popular, information institutions, particularly academic libraries and others that support researchers, will likely need to support this new format throughout its lifecycle, which may draw on research data management, digital preservation, and repository services. This article introduces volumetric video capture, discusses some of its current applications outside of the commercial film industry, and outlines the curation and preservation challenges that this new media format presents. The paper compares two different production workflows that result in different output qualities: professional and prosumer studio-based workflows. The analysis explores the digital curation challenges that volumetric video raises within these workflows, with considerations for selection and appraisal criteria, file format sustainability, metadata requirements, legal/ethical considerations, and directions forward for future research in digital curation
Digital Legacy - Who Do You Trust?
No full textIn this paper, we discuss views on trust around custodianship and curation of non-photographic digital legacies. Physical photographs have long been the artefact of choice for storytelling and leaving a legacy for those that come after. Digital photographs, on the other hand, present curation challenges in terms of the size and complexity of the user-generated libraries. Further, their highly personal nature can lead to concerns over possible embarrassing content, which makes custodianship difficult.
In a mixed method research project, five non-photographic digital asset types emerged as being significant in the daily lives of participants, namely music, books, programming, gaming and note-taking. We compared them to participants’ views of digital photographs as a legacy.
We found that journaling, music and books read were on par with photographs for emotional attachment and providing a sense of self, in some circumstances. Indeed, some non-photo assets, such as music playlists and reading lists were cited as being less context specific and more able to communicate sense of self than photographs.
Collections of non-photographic assets were typically much smaller than collections of photographs and were stored in more organised and centralised libraries, which makes curation easier. We also examined the intent to leave assets as legacy and the desire to curate them before leaving them.
Our research also revealed lack of defined custodianship for digital legacy data being left behind. Participants were pre-occupied with ultimate target audiences that might be interested in the legacy, as opposed to who would be trusted to look after and administer the legacy.
In future work, we plan to conduct a series of workshops on trust and custodianship to explore how a cohort of everyday users might navigate and show confidence in leaving a curated digital legacy
Two Decades, Same Story? Insights and Future Directions in Long Tail Data Curation
No full textThis paper examines the evolution of the concept of long tail research data in the scholarly literature. The “long tail” concept, originally used to describe “niche” digital products that have a significant market share when taken as an aggregate, was first applied to research data in 2007 to refer to a vast array of smaller, heterogeneous data collections that cumulatively represent a substantial portion of scientific knowledge. These datasets are frequently overlooked due to inadequate data management practices and institutional support. Bridging the discussions on data curation in library & information science (LIS) and domain-specific contexts, this paper identifies several themes in these discussions and offers insights, or provocations, that encourage researchers to rethink the existing frameworks and methods and find new approaches that would help both researchers and data professionals. This review seeks to enhance understanding of long tail data as both a concept and a field, while also informing current and future research and practice
From the Research Cycle to the People Cycle: Humanizing Digital Curation
No full textIn this paper, we argue that digital curators need to move beyond explaining technical jargon and workflows to collaborate with researchers to meet them where they are at when educating them on digital curation skills. At Mississippi State University, we teach students, staff, and faculty about digital curation by connecting it to the skills they already have and cut out complicated jargon to get to what really matters: knowing how to manage data so it can be understood and used. We focus our pedagogy on strengthening the curation skills they already have and bringing in newer concepts by framing them within areas they are already familiar with. We hope that by adding a people lifecycle to the research lifecycle, we can empower our researchers to be proactive in digital curation and feel confident to continue developing these skills
Making reproducibility a reality by 2035? Enabling publisher collaboration for enhanced data policy enforcement
No full textThis paper describes a project which identified practical and pragmatic ways to increase the FAIRness and reproducibility of published research. Academic journals have supported Open Science through the implementation of data sharing policies for over ten years; some evidence has since emerged on the additional time, resources and expertise that policy enforcement requires as part of an editorial workflow. A series of publisher workshops facilitated by the EC-funded TIER2 project aimed to identify the key checks needed to enforce strengthened journal data sharing policies and to understand which editorial roles have the capacity to undertake such enforcement. The intended outcome of this work was to establish the workflows and resourcing which can support academic journals to enforce stronger data sharing policies in future
Form as an Extension of Content: Strategy-Based Adaptation of the Interface of a Dataverse Installation
No full textIn October 2020, a data archive for social sciences and digital humanities was launched at the Belgian national archives institution, the State Archives of Belgium. This new infrastructure, called the Social Sciences and Digital Humanities Archive (SODHA), is meant to accrue and make available datasets in any of the disciplines that constitute social sciences and digital humanities. To support this endeavor, the online platform relies on the open-source software for digital repository management Dataverse, developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) of Harvard University.
IQSS have made it possible to customise installations of their software to a large extent, especially the formal, outer aspects. This makes for interesting design choices, not just for branding an installation but also to translate any organisation’s communication strategy with both broad and minute modifications. We contend that working on the design—that is, the formal aspects of an application—does not amount to “cosmetic” work; rather, it empowers the administrators of a platform to shape their front end so that it best conveys what its core functions and purposes—in other words, its content—are all about.
We present the context in which SODHA was launched, how we elaborated a particular communication strategy calibrated for researchers, and the ensuing design choices. Examples of changes and adaptations are provided and contextualised