International Journal of Digital Curation
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The Product and System Specificities of Measuring Curation Impact
Get PDFUsing three datasets archived at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), we describe the creation of a ‘data usage index’ for curation-specific impact assessments. Our work is focused on quantitatively evaluating climate and weather data used in earth and space science research, but we also discuss the application of this approach to other research data contexts. We conclude with some proposed future directions for metric-based work in data curation
Editorial
Get PDFKevin Ashley, Chief Editor, introduces Volume 8, Issue 1 (2013) of the International Journal of Digital Curation
Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices and perspectives
Get PDFAcademic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultations) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains—arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences—and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes, and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data-management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers
Adding Value by Taking a National and Institutional Approach to Research Data: The ANDS Experience
Get PDFThe Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has been working to add value to Australia’s research data environment since 2009. This paper looks at the changes that have occurred over this time, ANDS’ role in those changes and the current state of the Australian research sector at this time, using case studies of selected institutions
The Critical Role of Institutional Services in Open Access Advocacy
Get PDFThis paper examines the development of the Open Access movement in scholarly communication, with particular attention to some of the rhetorical strategies and policy mechanisms used to promote it to scholars and scientists. Despite the majority of journal publishers’ acceptance of author self-archiving practices, and the minimal time commitment required by authors to successfully self-archive their work in disciplinary or institutional repositories, the majority of authors still by and large avoid participation. The paper reviews the strategies and arguments used for increasing author participation in open access, including the role of open access mandates. We recommend a service-oriented approach towards increasing participation in open access, rather than rhetoric that speculates on the benefits that open access will have on text/data mining innovation. In advocating for open access participation, we recommend focusing on its most universal and tangible purpose: increasing public open (gratis) access to the published results of publicly funded research. Researchers require strong institutional support to understand the copyright climate of open access self-archiving, user-friendly interfaces and useful metrics, such as repository usage statistics. We recommend that mandates and well-crafted and responsive author support services at universities will ultimately be required to ensure the growth of open access. We describe the mediated deposit service that was developed to support author self-archiving in Spectrum: Concordia University Research Repository. By comparing the number of deposits of non-thesis materials (e.g. articles and conference presentations) that were accomplished through the staff-mediated deposit service to the number of deposits that were author-initiated, we demonstrate the relative significance of this service to the growth of the repository
Towards Emulation-as-a-Service: Cloud Services for Versatile Digital Object Access
Get PDFThe changing world of IT services opens the chance to more tightly integrate digital long-term preservation into systems, both for commercial and end users. The emergence of cloud offerings re-centralizes services, and end users interact with them remotely through standardized (web-)client applications on their various devices. This offers the chance to use partially the same concepts and methods to access obsolete computer environments and allows for more sustainable business processes. In order to provide a large variety of user-friendly remote emulation services, especially in combination with authentic performance and user experience, a distributed system model and architecture is required, suitable to run as a cloud service, allowing for the specialization both of memory institutions and third party service providers.The shift of the usually non-trivial task of the emulation of obsolete software environments from the end user to specialized providers can help to simplify digital preservation and access strategies. Besides offering their users better access to their holdings, libraries and archives may gain new business opportunities to offer services to a third party, such as businesses requiring authentic reproduction of digital objects and processes for legal reasons. This paper discusses cloud concepts as the next logical step for accessing original digital material. Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) fills the gap between the successful demonstration of emulation strategies as a long term access strategy and it’s perceived availability and usability. EaaS can build upon the ground of research and prototypical implementations of previous projects, and reuse well established remote access technology.In this article we develop requirements and a system model, suitable for a distributed environment. We will discuss the building blocks of the core services as well as requirements regarding access management. Finally, we will try to present a business model and estimate costs to implement and run such a service. The implementations of EaaS will influence future preservation planning in memory institutions, as it shifts the focus on object access workflows
Processes and Procedures for Data Publication: A Case Study in the Geosciences
Get PDFThe Peer REview for Publication and Accreditation of Research Data in the Earth sciences (PREPARDE) project is a JISC and NERC funded project which aims to investigate the policies and procedures required for the formal publication of research data, ranging from ingestion into a data repository, through to formal publication in a data journal. It also addresses key issues arising in the data publication paradigm, including, but not limited to, issues related to how one peer reviews a dataset, what criteria are needed for a repository to be considered objectively trustworthy, and how datasets and journal publications can be effectively cross-linked for the benefit of the wider research community. PREPARDE brings together a wide range of experts in the research, academic publishing and data management fields both within the Earth Sciences and in the broader life sciences with the aim of producing general guidelines applicable to a wide range of scientific disciplines and data publication types. This paper provides details of the work done in the first half of the project; the project itself will be completed in June 2013
Here, KAPTUR This! Identifying and Selecting the Infrastructure Required to Support the Curation and Preservation of Visual Arts Research Data
Get PDFResearch data is increasingly perceived as a valuable resource and, with appropriate curation and preservation, it has much to offer learning, teaching, research, knowledge transfer and consultancy activities in the visual arts. However, very little is known about the curation and preservation of this data: none of the specialist arts institutions have research data management policies or infrastructure and anecdotal evidence suggests that practice is ad hoc, left to individual researchers and teams with little support or guidance. In addition, the curation and preservation of such diverse and complex digital resources as found in the visual arts is, in itself, challenging. Led by the Visual Arts Data Service, a research centre of the University for the Creative Arts, in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art; Goldsmiths College, University of London; and University of the Arts London, and funded by JISC, the KAPTUR project (2011-2013) seeks to address the lack of awareness and explore the potential of research data management systems in the arts by discovering the nature of research data in the visual arts, investigating the current state of research data management, developing a model of best practice applicable to both specialist arts institutions and arts departments in multidisciplinary institutions, and by applying, testing and piloting the model with the four institutional partners. Utilising the findings of the KAPTUR user requirement and technical review, this paper will outline the method and selection of an appropriate research data management system for the visual arts and the issues the team encountered along the way
The CLARIN-NL Data Curation Service: Bringing Data to the Foreground
Get PDFAfter decades in which a great deal of effort was spent on the creation of resources, there are currently several initiatives worldwide that aim to create an interoperable, sustainable research infrastructure. An integral part of such an infrastructure constitutes the resources (data and tools) which researchers in the various disciplines employ. Whether the infrastructure will be successful in supporting the needs of the research communities it intends to cater for depends on a number of factors. One factor is that resources that are or could be relevant to the wider research community are made visible through this infrastructure and, to the greatest extent possible, accessible and usable. In practice, the durable availability of resources is often not properly regulated within research projects.CLARIN-NL is directed at creating an interoperable language resources infrastructure for the humanities in the Netherlands. The Data Curation Service was established in order to salvage language resources in this field that are threatened to be lost. In the CLARIN context, a great deal of attention is given to standards, formats and intellectual property rights. Consequently, the Data Curation Service (DCS) has a role as mediator in bringing researchers in the field of humanities and existing data centres closer together.This article consists of two parts: the first part provides the background to the work of the DCS while the second part illustrates the work of the DCS by describing the actual curation of a collection of language learner data
SEAD Virtual Archive: Building a Federation of Institutional Repositories for Long-Term Data Preservation in Sustainability Science
Get PDFMajor research universities are grappling with their response to the deluge of scientific data emerging through research by their faculty. Many are looking to their libraries and the institutional repositories for a solution. Scientific data introduces substantial challenges that the document-based institutional repository may not be suited to deal with. The Sustainable Environment - Actionable Data (SEAD) Virtual Archive (VA) specifically addresses the challenges of ‘long tail’ scientific data. In this paper, we propose requirements, policy and architecture to support not only the preservation of scientific data today using institutional repositories, but also rich access to data and their use into the future