Philip Konomos
Associate University Librarian
Arizona State University

For over a decade research universities have focused on building repositories and additional cyberinfrastructure to enhance and support new forms of 21st century research. With digital repositories in place, the time has come to address the next set of challenges: building content, assuring sustainability, and fostering new uses for existing repository content.

The Arizona State University Libraries has begun a set of initiatives working with faculty, research staff, and administrators in new and innovative ways. Efforts include targeting new (first and second year) tenure-track faculty to promote use of our repository services for research data; targeting senior, Baby-Boom generation faculty to help capture their legacy research data before they retire; building a catalog of learning objects to leverage existing repository content; and doing systematic outreach to colleges, schools, and research centers to embed library staff in grant-funded projects as early as possible (preferably at the grant writing stage).

http://lib.asu.edu/data
http://repository.asu.edu

Julia Kochi
Director, Collections and User Services
University of California, San Francisco

Perry Willett
Digital Preservation Services Manager
California Digital Library

The goal of the DataShare project is to achieve widespread voluntary sharing of scientific data. In an effort to reach this goal, DataShare has created a data sharing website that enables investigators at the University of California (UC) to publish all of their research outputs (e.g., tabular data, images, and software). Currently, data sharing is not widespread across all disciplines; scientific advancement and society as a whole would benefit if more research data were widely shared and easily discoverable. The DataShare website serves as a portal for (1) finding data, via browsing or searching by metadata fields; and (2) depositing data and accompanying DataCite metadata with customized data use agreements. The DataShare project is a collaboration between the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), the UCSF Library, and the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library.

This project briefing will include discussion of the impetus for the DataShare project, the collaborators’ roles, the methods used to work towards the project goals, and a demonstration of the current DataShare website. Additionally, discussion of the role of projects such as DataShare in the larger landscape of data management and archiving tools will be included.

 http://datashare.ucsf.edu

Presentation

James Simon
System Architect
Stanford University

The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) is a nationwide initiative to create a preservation backbone for digital information of interest to the academy. DPN comprises a handful of large-scale preservation repositories, which together form a heterogeneous network of secure, trustworthy digital archives, each operated under diverse geographical, organizational, financial, and technical regimes. Robust (bit) auditing and repair functions ensure the integrity and security of content over time. Intellectual property agreements among depositors, repositories and the university members of the Network ensure succession of rights to use content in the event of the dissolution of the original depositor or archive. Since late 2012, a technical team from the five initial nodes has been working on an initial implementation of the network. This presentation will present that group’s work, which includes basic design principles, functional requirements and system specifications; the Network’s high level architecture and protocols for content replication and auditing; and framing of detailed service and policy questions that will drive the Network’s overall design and operation. DPN members and digital preservation experts are especially encouraged to attend and participate in this interactive session.

http://www.dpn.org

Presentation

Jonathan Markow
Chief Community Strategist
DuraSpace

Last year DuraSpace reported on the early status of DuraCloud for Research (DfR), a project funded by the Alfred. P. Sloan Foundation to provide enhanced cloud storage for research data. DfR combines local monitoring and backup of project data from all local sources (including DropBox and other Web services) into DuraCloud. Metadata extracted during the upload process is stored in a cloud-hosted Fedora repository. DfR utilizes a data management and visualization tool developed by Discovery Garden for the Smithsonian Institution to provide the researcher and curation staff with a platform to organize the data and further enrich associated metadata. In this session, DuraSpace will offer a post-grant summary of progress and discuss next steps.

Kent State University Libraries has developed a local digital storage system that provides high-volume, medium-term storage of digital items. The system uses very inexpensive hardware and locally-developed (soon to be open source) software. Technically not a DAM nor a dark archive, this system provides for the distributed redundant storage of three validated (fixity checked) copies of digital files, some of which could then move to DAM or dark archive based on retention schedule and/or significance. The system supports upload via batch, zip, and drag and drop, and it supports a wide array of standard file types. Items are assigned an expiration date based on a retention period, which is based, in turn, on an assigned retention group. System-assigned and user-supplied metadata support a search mechanism. Stored content is organized by Workgroup, Project, and Item. Three servers (pods) distributed throughout campus each support 36TB of storage. The servers synchronize all files daily and nightly between themselves when all checksums are valid. The system runs on CentOS, and uses RAID6. There is no strict 7/24/365 up-time expectation; the primary concern is data preservation.

End-users, staff in various campus divisions, contribute their own data for storage, and the data in question includes data that is the responsibility of University Libraries, Special Collections, and University Archives. The system stores master files like tiffs; there is no need to store derivative files, which can be easily regenerated on the fly. At the current capacity of 36TB per each pod, the total cost is $ 0.58 per GB. The current hardware configuration can support up to 108TB per pod, at a total cost of $0.30 per GB. This system is envisioned as a middle-layer storage system that can provide massive storage at very low cost, and it can provide a central workspace where data can be stored before it is moved to other systems like a DAM system, a dark archive, an institutional repository, a public digital gallery, etc., or before it is disposed of based on a retention schedule. This session will offer more detail on the system’s hardware and software functionality.

http://www.backblaze.com/
http://www.protocase.com/products/index.php?e=Backblaze

Presentation

In the past two years, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has engaged in an intensive program of working with individual universities to increase their capacity and capability to plan and deliver research data management (RDM) services. This work is carried out against a background of increasing funder requirements on researchers and institutions, and developing national and international infrastructure. This presentation will include a description of what has worked well, what has not worked very well, the changes that have been observed, and the outlook for the future, as well as discussion of how the DCC’s work can be transferred and replicated outside the United Kingdom.

http://www.dcc.ac.uk
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/community/institutional-engagements

LiAM (Linked Archival Metadata) is an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded planning project focused on facilitating the application of linked data approaches to archival description. Despite the standardization and automation of archival description since the 1990s, primarily through the development and wide adoption of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), archivists still struggle with the challenge of describing complex archival collections. In particular, archival finding aids are not well suited for describing either records produced by complex organizations or composites of organizations, or electronic records and digital objects managed in digital environments such as databases and social network sites.

The distributed and dynamic nature of contemporary archival materials mirrors the evolving network of documents that is the World Wide Web. The architecture of the Web, in particular the approach described by linked data, a rich, semantically related data environment built into the Web’s architecture, provides a powerful set of tools for modeling complex relationships and providing dynamic and flexible access to information.

Most finding aids, archival collection descriptions often encoded in EAD, are hierarchical and linear narrative documents that take a top-down approach to archival description. The linear flow of the traditional finding aid closely mirrors the physical arrangement of the documents in hand, serving both as a description of the collection and as a map to where records are physically located on the actual shelves or within the actual boxes and folders.

LiAM envisions a different approach by leveraging the powerful reliance on linking inherent in the architecture of the World Wide Web itself. The approach of linked data uses the technology of the Web to define relationships between myriad resources. The LiAM Planning Project got underway in October 2012 and has laid a roadmap that is focused on identifying a graduated approach for archives at all levels to begin to expose their descriptions using linked data. The purpose of this session will be to present the outline of LiAM’s deliverables, share progress to date, and seek feedback.

 http://go.tufts.edu/liam

Katherine Akers
Council on Library and Information Resources Fellow
Emory University

Lori Jahnke
Anthropology Librarian and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Emory University

Elliott Shore
Executive Director
Association of Research Libraries

Rachel Frick
Director, Digital Library Federation Program
Council on Library and Information Resources

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is in its ninth year, and with the coming cohort, CLIR and more recently the Digital Library Federation (DLF) have helped to prepare more than 90 fellows who have worked at various intersections of the academic world. In recent years, more and more of the fellows’ work concerns data curation, spurred on by support from the Sloan and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is now using the deep subject preparation of scholars and scientists from across the disciplines in order to help rethink how academia will approach this issue. This session will sketch out the ways in which the program is changing its approach to the curriculum for the fellows and engage the attendees in a conversation about how that can be most successful.

http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc
http://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc/applicants/dc-science

Institutional repositories (IRs) collect, manage and display publications and their metadata. However, an institution’s research, expertise and capacity is described by more than publications. The University of Hong Kong (HKU) Scholars Hub, hosted in DSpace, began as the HKU IR in 2005. Asking for voluntary deposit of publications from HKU academics, it received little notice, and more importantly, little support from University senior management. In 2009 a new HKU initiative, Knowledge Exchange (KE), adopted the Hub as a key vehicle to share knowledge and skill with the community outside HKU. With funding support from the Office of KE, the data model of DSpace was extended to include relational tables on non-publication objects, including people, grants, and patents, holding attributes of these objects, such as co-investigators, co-inventors, co-prize winners, research interests, languages spoken, supervision of postgraduate theses, etc.

The DSpace user interface now delivers an integrated search and display on these objects and attributes, as well as on ones newly derived, such as authority work on name disambiguation and synonymy in Roman and Hanzi, visualizations of networks of co-authors, co-investigators, etc., metrics extracted from external sources such as Scopus, WoS, PubMed, Google Scholar Citations, internal alt-metrics of view and download counts, and more. Beyond the functions of an IR, the Hub now performs as a system for reputation management, impact management, and research networking and profiling, all of which are concepts included in the broad term “Current Research Information System” (CRIS). These new objects and attributes curated from several trusted sources, and integrated into the present mashup, contextualize and highlight HKU research, and attract more hits, than an IR with only publications.

The HKU Office of Knowledge Exchange has now funded the modularization of these new HKU features of DSpace. Together with its partner, CINECA of Italy, this work is being made available in open source for the DSpace community.

Presentation

Peter Schirmbacher
Professor, School of Library and Information Science
Humboldt University of Berlin

Facilitating Replication of Research Results in Economics (Tochtermann)

Empirical studies are increasingly important in many disciplines, including in economics, where a rising number of journals publish empirical papers in which the authors have used data sets for their research. However, so far there have been few means to replicate these research results within the framework of the corresponding article and to verify the findings claimed in an empirical paper. The DFG (German Research Foundation) funded project EDaWaX is intended to meet some of these challenges. One of project’s main objectives is to develop a publication related data archive for economics journals.

http://www.edawax.de

re3data.org: Establishing a Registry for Research Data Repositories (Schirmbacher)

Research data are valuable and ubiquitous. The permanent access to research data is a challenge for all stakeholders in the scientific community. The long-term preservation and the principle of open access to research data offer broad opportunities for the scientific community.

More and more universities and research centers are starting to build research data repositories allowing permanent access to data sets in a trustworthy environment. Due to disciplinary requirements, the landscape of data repositories is rather heterogeneous, thus it is difficult for researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions to select appropriate repositories for archiving or retrieving research data.

The goal of re3data.org is to create a global registry of research data repositories that will cover research data repositories from different academic disciplines. The registry will be a source of information on the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. In the course of this mission, re3data.org aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access, and better visibility of research data.

The alpha version of the registry has been online since December 2012. The launch of version 1.0 is planned for spring 2013. Metadata which has been entered from existing sources will be reviewed and complemented if necessary.
Partners in the project are:
• School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University Berlin
• German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ)
• Library of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

The partners are actively involved in the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI), which is committed to improving information and communication services in higher education institutions by providing the necessary information infrastructures locally and nationally.

http://re3data.org