International Journal of Digital Curation
Not a member yet
605 research outputs found
Sort by
Attitudes and Aspirations in a Diverse World: The Project StORe Perspective on Scientific Repositories
Get PDFProject StORe was conceived as an initiative to apply digital library technologies in the creation of new value for published research. Ostensibly a technical project, its primary objective was the design of middleware to enable bi-directional links between source repositories containing research data and output repositories containing research publications. Hence, researchers would be able to navigate directly from within an electronic article to the source or synthesised data from which that article was derived. To achieve a product that directly reflects user needs, a survey of researchers was conducted across seven scientific disciplines. This survey exposed the spectrum of cultural pressures, preferences and prejudices that influence the research process, as well as a range of practices in the production and management of research data. Aspects of the research environment revealed by the survey are considered in this paper in the context of repository use and, more broadly, the requirements, roles and responsibilities necessary to good data management
Editorial
Get PDFPeter Buneman introduces the third issue of the International Journal of Digital Curation
The Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2008)
Get PDFThe Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects was held at the British Library on September 29–30, 2008, with the theme “Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation”. Topics ranged from the technical foundations of digital preservation through preservation system architectures to the organizational and policy issues facing the custodians of digital resources. There were also sessions dedicated to dealing with particular types of content, training needs, and methods for auditing needs and services
Access to Data for eResearch: Designing the Australian National Data Service Discovery Services
Get PDFMuch work on data repositories has derived from effort on document repositories. It is our contention that people do not access research data for the same reasons that they access research publications. We argue that it is valuable to understand information needs, both immediate and contextual, in establishing both what information should be collected, what metadata are captured, and what discovery services should be established. We report on the information needs that we have collected in our efforts in establishing the Australian National Data Service. These needs cover much more than data – there are needs for information about the data, their creators, a need for overviews, and further requirements to do with proof, collaboration, and innovation. We provide an analysis of those needs, and a set of conclusions that has led to some implementation decisions for ANDS
Scientific Publication Packages – A Selective Approach to the Communication and Archival of Scientific Output
Get PDFThe use of digital technologies within research has led to a proliferation of data, many new forms of research output and new modes of presentation and analysis. Many scientific communities are struggling with the challenge of how to manage the terabytes of data and new forms of output, they are producing. They are also under increasing pressure from funding organizations to publish their raw data, in addition to their traditional publications, in open archives. In this paper I describe an approach that involves the selective encapsulation of raw data, derived products, algorithms, software and textual publications within “scientific publication packages”. Such packages provide an ideal method for: encapsulating expert knowledge; for publishing and sharing scientific process and results; for teaching complex scientific concepts; and for the selective archival, curation and preservation of scientific data and output. They also provide a bridge between technological advances in the Digital Libraries and eScience domains. In particular, I describe the RDF-based architecture that we are adopting to enable scientists to construct, publish and manage “scientific publication packages” - compound digital objects that encapsulate and relate the raw data to its derived products, publications and the associated contextual, provenance and administrative metadata
Data Curation Standards and Social Science Occupational Information Resources
Get PDFOccupational information resources - data about the characteristics of different occupational positions - are widely used in the social sciences, across a range of disciplines and international contexts. They are available in many formats, most often constituting small electronic files that are made freely downloadable from academic web pages. However there are several challenges associated with how occupational information resources are distributed to, and exploited by, social researchers. In this paper we describe features of occupational information resources, and indicate the role digital curation can play in exploiting them. We report upon the strategies used in the GEODE research project (Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment1). This project attempts to develop long-term standards for the distribution of occupational information resources, by providing a standardized framework-based electronic depository for occupational information resources, and by providing a data indexing service, based on e-Science middleware, which collates occupational information resources and makes them readily accessible to non-specialist social scientists
Curation: A Global Collaborative Challenge
Get PDFThis article provides some background to the Digital Curation Centre and concentrates on a brief overview of the aims of the 3rd International Digital Curation Conference to be held in Washington, D.C. this December, together with information on the array of prominent speakers
Digital Data Preservation for Scholarly Publications in Astronomy
Get PDFAstronomy is similar to other scientific disciplines in that scholarly publication relies on the presentation and interpretation of data. But although astronomy now has archives for its primary research telescopes and associated surveys, the highly processed data that is presented in the peer-reviewed journals and is the basis for final analysis and interpretation is generally not archived and has no permanent repository. We have initiated a project whose goal is to implement an end-to-end prototype system which, through a partnership of a professional society, that society’s scholarly publications/publishers, research libraries, and an information technology substrate provided by the Virtual Observatory, will capture high-level digital data as part of the publication process and establish a distributed network of curated, permanent data repositories. The data in this network will be accessible through the research journals, astronomy data centers, and Virtual Observatory data discovery portals
Graduate Curriculum for Biological Information Specialists: A Key to Integration of Scale in Biology
Get PDFScientific data problems do not stand in isolation. They are part of a larger set of challenges associated with the escalation of scientific information and changes in scholarly communication in the digital environment. Biologists in particular are generating enormous sets of data at a high rate, and new discoveries in the biological sciences will increasingly depend on the integration of data across multiple scales. This work will require new kinds of information expertise in key areas. To build this professional capacity we have developed two complementary educational programs: a Biological Information Specialist (BIS) masters degree and a concentration in Data Curation (DC). We believe that BISs will be central in the development of cyberinfrastructure and information services needed to facilitate interdisciplinary and multi-scale science. Here we present three sample cases from our current research projects to illustrate areas in which we expect information specialists to make important contributions to biological research practice
Key Stakeholders Pledge to a Strategic Approach to Preserve the Digital Records of Science
Get PDFAn overview of how the hopes offered by digitisation turned into a problem when the explosion of formats and new technologies began to render material inaccessible and the way in which the Chairman sees the Task Force movng to address the challenge of preserving and accessing the record of science in the long term