| Janet McCue Associate University Librarian for the Life Sciences & Director, Mann Library Cornell University | Jon Corson-Rikert Head, Information Technology Services, Mann Library Cornell University |
A lack of organized data archiving may be just as serious a problem for scholarship and research as the outright disappearance of data. Perhaps the most significant contribution the library can make to the persistent discovery of scholarly information is to fix what we might call the “first mile” problem: the adequate identification and description of information before it is discovered by search engines and disseminated across the Web. Addressing this issue by forging richer relationships between information resources and related content will help improve the precision of searching and provide more useful context on retrieval. This briefing discusses some options for solving this first mile problem by exploring the issues surrounding a new type of collaboration between scientists and research library staff. The presenters will focus first on their National Science Foundation Small Grant for Exploratory Research and the activities related to the preservation, discovery, and sharing of primary linguistic and ecological research data. They will then show how concepts and standards from the Semantic Web community are being applied to categorize and connect related data elements about people and their research drawn from central IT data warehouses, department data marts, and direct faculty input as a service to promote the discovery of faculty and their research activities.
http://vivo.cornell.edu
http://metadata.mannlib.cornell.edu/lilac
Handout (PDF)
Presentation (PDF)