UW Libraries hosting virtual conference on "Dealing with the Data Deluge"

The UW Libraries is excited to announce that it will be hosting an upcoming NISO (National Information Standards Organization) virtual conference on "Dealing with the Data Deluge: Successful Techniques for Scientific Data Management." Attendance is open to the UW community.

• Where: Allen Auditorium, UW Libraries
• When: Wednesday, April 23, 8am-2pm
• What: "Dealing with the Data Deluge: Successful Techniques for Scientific Data Management," a NISO virtual conference

With funding support from the Libraries Organization Development & Training to cover our site registration, this virtual conference will "explore in greater depth than traditional webinars some of the practical lessons from those who have implemented data management and developed best practices, as well as provide some insight into the evolving issues the community faces." More details from the event page:

With the expansion of digital data collection and the increased expectations of data sharing, researchers are turning to their libraries or institutional repositories as a place to store and preserve that data. Many institutions have created such data management services and see the data curation role as a growing and important element of their service portfolio. While some of the experience in managing other types of digital resources is transferrable, the management of large-scale scientific data has many special requirements and challenges. From metadata collection and cataloging data sources, to identification, discovery, and preservation, best practices and standards are still in their infancy.

Topics and Speakers include:

• Keynote Speaker – Jan Brase, Ph.D., German National Library of Science and Technology; Managing Agent of DateCite, Chair of the International DOI Foundation (IDF), Vice-President of the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), and Co-Chair of the CODATA Data Citation task group
• Guidelines and Resources for Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Data Access Plans –Jared Lyle, Director of Data Curation Services, Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), University of Michigan
• Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles: Implementation of the Principles in the Harvard Dataverse Repository – Merce Corsas, Ph.D., Director of Data Science, Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), Harvard University
• Purdue University Research Repository (PURR): A Commitment to Supporting Researchers – Michael Witt, Head, Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2); Associate Professor of Library Science, Purdue University Research Repository (PURR)
• Is This Data Fit for My Use? The Challenges and Opportunities Data Provenance Presents – Adriane Chapman, MITRE
• A Durable Space: Technologies for Accessing Our Collective Digital Heritage – David Wilcox, Product Manager, DuraSpace
• The SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Project: A Joint Initiative of ARL, AAU, and APLU –Judy Ruttenberg, Program Director for Transforming Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries (ARL)

More information about the event, including the schedule, is online at www.niso.org/news/events/2014/virtual/data_deluge/. 

Research Data Management Workshops: Lessons Learned

From January 22 to March 5, 2014, three University of Washington librarians offered a seven-week course in research data management. As a complement to the two workshops we offered in 2013, which were geared toward research data management basics for librarians, this series was aimed at graduate students, primarily in the School of Forest and Environmental Sciences, Biology, Engineering, the iSchool and Health Sciences.

We ran the course as a pilot of the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum. Jenny Muilenburg, Mahria Lebow and Joanne Rich worked together to offer the class, which was designed as a one-hour meeting with lecture and exercises, meeting once a week for seven weeks. Students were asked to register, but the classes were not required, and no credit was given. Each of the weeks touched on one concept from the NECDMC curriculum, with one change made mid-course that combined two concepts into one lecture. We took each lecture module from NECDMC and modified it to suit our personal and institutional preferences, as well as adding UW-specific information. One primary lecture room was used on the main campus, where we both recorded the lecture and streamed it to a second location in Health Sciences, where Joanne Rich facilitated the streamed lecture and ran the exercises off-air.

Each class consisted of about 30 minutes of lecture, and 30 minutes of exercise and discussion. Module topics included types, stages and formats of data; metadata; storage, backup and security; legal and ethical considerations; sharing and reuse; and archiving and preservation. Experts from on campus were asked to contribute opinions and UW-specific information, specifically on metadata, storage and security, and legal and ethical information. Overall class evaluations after each lecture were positive, with good feedback about what to include in future iterations of the class.

It was a great first foray into RDM curriculum for non-librarians, although attendance with attrition was not as good as we'd hoped. Our next move will be to take this experience and the curriculum, modify and shorten, and present it to subject-specific librarian groups on campus. I'd like to see one for STEM disciplines and the social sciences, and the health science librarians are working on one for their disciplines. More information will be forthcoming as we pull together what we've learned and where we'll go from here.