Post on 27-Mar-2015
John MacCollEuropean Director, RLG Partnership
9 June 2010
The Role of Libraries in Data CurationOr ‘How do we even get started?’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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What I want to talk about
•The importance of data• Institutional vs domain solutions•Skills needs•Our project•Reward structures
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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The importance of data
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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It’s the data, stupid
• ‘astronomers are just as likely to point a software query tool at a digital sky survey as to point a telescope at the stars’ (The Economist, Feb 2010)
• ‘“It's like the invention of the telescope," Franco Moretti, a Stanford professor of English and comparative literature, says of Google Books. "All of a sudden, an enormous amount of matter becomes visible.” (The Chronicle, ‘The humanities go Google’, May 28 2010)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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DataVerse (Gary King, 2007)
“Data sometimes exist on individual researchers’ Web sites, without professional backups, off-site replication, plans for format conversion and migration, or professional cataloging.”
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Pious hopes (Carole Palmer)
• 60% ‘archive’ generated or collected data (no offsite backup)
• 61% expect to keep more than 10 years
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Data lost, and data never born (U Wisconsin Summary Report of the Research Data Management Study Group (2009))
‘In some cases, inadequate storage capacity is leading to loss of data: forcing some researchers to discard data from past experiments in order to make room for current ones or to avoid certain types of experiments and research altogether’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Data and their uses
Primary data: sensory, numeric, digitised, geospatial, etc
Secondary artifacts: statistical and pattern analyses; subset extractions; visualisations; simulations;
discovery environments
Ancillary data: questionnaires, fieldnotes, lab notebooks, data dictionaries, annotations, lecture
notes, etc
Freely available Locked away
Embargoed Shared with collaborators
transformations
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Don’t try this at home?
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Institutional vs domain solutions
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access: on aggregation
‘Creating economies of scale among archives when possible is always desirable, and may be critical when the materials under stewardship require particular kinds of expertise that are scarce. This is the case for much scientific data.’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Qualified gravitational pull (Green and Gutmann)
‘Most institutional repositories do not and cannot offer support for managing dataset formats over time … Policies for long-term stewardship vary among institutions, but many have developed a sliding scale of preservation promises’
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Oxford University: Research data management services: findings of the consultation with service providers (September 2008)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Cornell DataStaR: a ‘staging repository’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Datasets in Cornell IR
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Monash approach (institutional) (Treloar)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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U Wisconsin proposal
‘Solutions comprised solely of expensive technology will fail, because of the underlying need to establish long-lasting cultural stability within and between the research, library, and IT communities on campus.’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Curation responsibilities (Carlson, The Chronicle, 2006)
“Data from Big Science is … easier to handle, understand and archive.
Small Science is horribly heterogeneous and far more vast. In time Small Science will generate 2-3 times more data than Big Science.”
big science data
small science data
institution?
domain?
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Experiments … failures …
•NSF DataNet – Data Conservancy project. $20m awarded. Led by JHU. Includes social sciences.
•U. Va. Mellon grant $870k. Programmers and archivists. Includes Stanford, Yale and Hull. To create a model for digital collection management ‘that can be easily shared among research libraries’.
•UKRDS
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Meanwhile …
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Specialist data archives
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Skills needs
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Is this possible (Gabridge)?
‘libraries can develop existing liaisons with interest, passion, and strong analytical skills; or they can recruit domain experts, and teach them about excellent information science practices.’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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ARL study: Scott Brandt
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Our project
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Joint OCLC Research-LIBER
•Binghamton•Brigham Young•Cambridge•Leeds•Melbourne•Nijmegen•Oxford
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Deliverables
•Desk research•Case studies• Interviews with researchers•Report and recommendations
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Project Aim
‘It has been frequently asserted in the literature on data curation that there are new service roles for research libraries emerging. This project will seek to test this hypothesis by considering the data curation requirements of a number of recently completed research projects in a sample group of North American and European universities …’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Method
‘Each university partner will produce two or three case studies of projects in which data has been generated, and consider the data curation implications of these … The project will conclude with an assessment of the potential role of the research library in general in relation to such datasets, based on the examples of good practice discovered via the case studies.’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Project Approach
‘The proposed project will adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach and be grounded in the realities of data storage and preservation behaviour as exemplified in a number of real instances’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Scale again …
‘We consider that the question of how to arrive at an articulation between the institutional library and domain or funder data archives is one of the most urgent requirements in this area, and the project will explore it carefully.’
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Environments: data
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Timescapes (Leeds)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Nyman/Jones Archive (Leeds)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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The Australian Women’s Register (Melbourne)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Life Patterns (Melbourne)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Incremental Project (Cambridge)
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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What do we expect?
•Not a great deal!•Need to adjust our timescales?•Signs of progress?
• Indications of favourable organisational frameworks?• Indications of favourable policies?
•A taking of stock …
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Reward structures
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Day’s understatement
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Being excited about being cited (DataVerse, King)
‘Articles with accessible data are cited twice as often as otherwise equivalent articles that do not provide data access.’
‘Articles in journals with replication policies that make data available are cited thrice as frequently as otherwise equivalent articles without accessible data’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Library neutrality (Steinhart, 2007)?
‘There is ample evidence that even when appropriate data repositories exist for a particular discipline, researchers often fail to take full advantage of them … This lack of participation in data sharing and archival activities suggests an opportunity for academic libraries to provide a much-needed service’
The role of libraries in data curation. RLG Partnership Annual Meeting, Chicago, June 2010
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Thinning the library
•No longer just about capture of outputs at the endpoint
•The library has to be involved in the whole process of research and scholarship, throughout its lifecycle
•This involves ‘thinning out’ the library•Rethinking the point of engagement•The library becomes engineering …•… and people
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1. What is the story of your data?2. What form and format are the data in?3. What is the expected lifespan of your data?4. How could your data be used, reused, and repurposed?5. How large is your dataset, and what is its rate of growth?6. Who are potential audiences for your data?7. Who owns the data?8. Does the dataset include any sensitive information?9. What publications or discoveries have resulted from the data?10. How should the data be made accessible?
Ten Questions to Begin a Conversation With Your Faculty About Data Curation (Witt & Carlson)
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Repositories at present are the wrong model (Green and Guttman)
‘repositories position themselves at or near the end of the scientific research life cycle. Their goal is less to partner with researchers or with domain-specific repositories throughout the research life cycle than … to garner the value of the institution’s productivity’
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Appraisal (Cornell)
‘The archivist can no longer wait “passively at the end of the life cycle for records to arrive at the archives when their creators no longer wanted them – or were dead” (Cook 2000).’
Discussion!
John MacColl
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Next up
Lunch and then…1:00
Framing Libraries and the EnvironmentLorcan Dempsey, OCLC Research
Buckingham