Data Webinars, Live and Recorded

Needing a refresher on data your data reference skills? Looking for background information on a particular type of data? Check out the following webinars focused on data and data reference:

On August 18, data librarians Hailey Mooney and Jen Darragh will present a webinar aimed at helping you answer patrons' data and statistics questions. "Data for the Non-Data Librarian" will be held from 11PST/2EST, and will hit topics such as the difference between data and statistics, search strategies for both, ways of finding local area data, and how to leverage free and paid data resources. Register at http://ow.ly/QMAOR.

Earlier today, the Government Resources Section of the North Carolina Library Association hosted the latest in their "Help, I'm an Accidental Government Information Librarian" webinars. Kristin Partlo presented "Accessing Datasets for the Data Curious," which included information on helping patrons download data, exploring the relevance of a dataset, and alerting patrons to common pitfalls and patterns. This series of webinars is archived online: other webinars covered court records, environmental data, the National Archives, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, geocoding, and many (many!) more, most of which have the slides and recorded session available.

Upcoming Data-related Webinars

There are three upcoming webinars that may be of interest to data-minded folks:

• DuraSpace is hosting Stewarding Research Data with Fedora and Islandora, September 10, 2013, 11am-12pm Eastern. Mark Leggott from the University of Prince Edward Island and founder of the open source Islandora project will be speaking. From the blurb: “In one example at UPEI, Islandora tools are being built to sync data from systems like DropBox and Google Drive to Fedora, providing immediate preservation services for any arbitrary collection of data. This Physical Data Model is intended to provide a quick and seamless integration with Islandora where the researchers can subsequently enrich and optionally choose to share their data with others. In another example the Smithsonian is applying a set of Intellectual Data Models to steward research output from a variety of projects. In this case data is ingested into Islandora against a domain-specific data model that applies specific metadata forms, data transformations and data viewers to make the data more accessible immediately on ingest. Register here: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e7yc78n7872b1e63&llr=5iy95gcab.
• NISO is hosting a two-part webinar on Research Data Curation. Part 1 is on E-Science Librarianship (September 11, 1-2:30pm Eastern), and will discuss “new librarian strategies, tools, and technologies developed to support the lifecycle of scholarly production and data curation. Specific challenges that face research libraries will be described and potential responses will be explored, along with a discussion of the types of skills and services that will be required for librarians to effectively curate research output.”  Registration is here: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/webinars/escience. Part 2 is on Libraries and Big Data (September 18, 1-2:30pm Eastern), and will explore librarians and their role in data curation: “There are many challenges to effectively manage and curate this data—challenges that are both similar and different to managing document archives. Libraries can and are assuming a key role in making this information more useful, visible, and accessible, such as creating taxonomies, designing metadata schemes, and systematizing retrieval methods. Our panelists will talk about their experience with big data curation, best practices for research data management, and the tools used by libraries as they take on this evolving role.” Registration is here: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/webinars/data_curation.
• The National Research Council's Board on Research Data and Information will be hosting a public symposium titled Privacy in a Big Data World, September 23, 3-5:30pm Eastern. The symposium will discuss such issues as providing adequate privacy protection for individuals without impeding research and innovation, how different regulatory approaches to privacy impact national and transnational research, and how society’s perspective on privacy is evolving.More detail can be found here: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/brdi/PGA_084312