International Journal of Digital Curation

Digital Curation Education at the Universities of Ibadan and Liverpool

Abiola Abioye, James Lowry, Rosemary Lynch — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:00:11 +0100

This article presents the findings of the Ibadan/Liverpool Digital Curation Curriculum Review Project, a research project conducted to formally benchmark the teaching of digital curation in the archival education programmes at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. It provides background to the history and establishment of both universities and the development of their archives curricula. A matrix was developed using the DigCurV Curriculum Framework to assess whether digital curation skills and knowledge outlined in the framework are being taught, practised and tested in the Master’s programmes. These skills and knowledge were assessed according to the four domains outlined in DigCurV: Knowledge and Intellectual Abilities (KIA), Personal Qualities (PQ), Professional Conduct (PC), and Management and Quality Assurance (MQA), to levels appropriate to practitioners and managers. The exercise identified skill and knowledge areas where teaching materials could be shared between the universities, and areas where new materials are needed.

Progress in Research Data Services

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:25:44 +0100

University libraries have played an important role in constructing an infrastructure of support for Research Data Management at an institutional level. This paper presents a comparative analysis of two international surveys of libraries about their involvement in Research Data Services conducted in 2014 and 2018. The aim was to explore how services had developed over this time period, and to explore the drivers and barriers to change. In particular, there was an interest in how far the FAIR data principles had been adopted.

Services in nearly every area were more developed in 2018 than before, but technical services remained less developed than advisory. Progress on institutional policy was also evident. However, priorities did not seem to have shifted significantly. Open ended answers suggested that funder policy, rather than researcher demand, remained the main driver of service development and that resources and skills gaps remained issues. While widely understood as an important reference point and standard, because of their relatively recent publication date, FAIR principles had not been widely adopted explicitly in policy.

Making Meaning of Historical Papua New Guinea Recordings

Amanda Harris, Steven Gagau, Jodie Kell, Nick Thieberger, Nick Ward — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 07:18:25 +0100

PARADISEC’s PNG collections represent the great diversity in the regions and languages of PNG. In 2016 and 2017, in recognition of the value of PARADISEC’s collections, ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) provided funding for us to concentrate efforts on enhancing the metadata that describes our Papua New Guinea (PNG) collections, an effort designed to maximise the findability and useability of the language and music recordings preserved in the archive for both source communities and researchers. PARADISEC's subsequent engagement with PNG language experts has led to collaborations with members of speaker communities who are part of the PNG diaspora in Australia. In this paper, we show that making historical recordings more findable, accessible and better described can result in meaningful interactions with and responses to the data in source communities. The effects of empowering speaker communities in their relationships to archives can be far reaching – even inverting, or disrupting the power relationships that have resulted from the colonial histories in which archives are embedded.

Putting the Trust into Trusted Data Repositories: A Federated Solution for the Australian National Imaging Facility

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:14:29 +0100

The National Imaging Facility (NIF) provides Australian researchers with state-of-the-art instrumentation—including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), X-ray computed tomography (CT) and multispectral imaging – and expertise for the characterisation of animals, plants and materials.

To maximise research outcomes, as well as to facilitate collaboration and sharing, it is essential not only that the data acquired using these instruments be managed, curated and archived in a trusted data repository service, but also that the data itself be of verifiable quality. In 2017, several NIF nodes collaborated on a national project to define the requirements and best practices necessary to achieve this, and to establish exemplar services for both preclinical MRI data and clinical ataxia MRI data.

In this paper we describe the project, its key outcomes, challenges and lessons learned, and future developments, including extension to other characterisation facilities and instruments/modalities.

Updating the Data Curation Continuum

Andrew Treloar, Jens Klump — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:10:47 +0100

The Data Curation Continuum was developed as a way of thinking about data repository infrastructure. Since its original development over a decade ago, a number of things have changed in the data infrastructure domain. This paper revisits the thinking behind the original data curation continuum and updates it to respond to changes in research objects, storage models, and the repository landscape in general.

Identifying Topical Coverages of Curricula using Topic Modeling and Visualization Techniques: A Case of Digital and Data Curation

Seungwon Yang, Boryung Ju, Haeyong Chung — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:04:22 +0100

Digital/data curation curricula have been around for a couple of decades. Currently, several ALA-accredited LIS programs offer digital/data curation courses and certificate programs to address the high demand for professionals with the knowledge and skills to handle digital content and research data in an ever-changing information environment. In this study, we aimed to examine the topical scopes of digital/data curation curricula in the context of the LIS field. We collected 16 syllabi from the digital/data curation courses, as well as textual descriptions of the 11 programs and their core courses offered in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. The collected data were analyzed using a probabilistic topic modeling technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to identify both common and unique topics. The results are the identification of 20 topics both at the program- and course-levels. Comparison between the program- and course-level topics uncovered a set of unique topics, and a number of common topics. Furthermore, we provide interactive visualizations for digital/data curation programs and courses for further analysis of topical distributions. We believe that our combined approach of a topic modeling and visualizations may provide insight for identifying emerging trends and co-occurrences of topics among digital/data curation curricula in the LIS field.

Challenges and Directions in 3D and VR Data Curation

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 07:18:25 +0100

This study identifies challenges and promising directions in the curation of 3D data. 3D visualization shows great promise for a range of scholarly fields through interactive engagement with and analysis of spatially complex artifacts, spaces, and data. While the new affordability of emerging 3D capture technologies presents greater academic possibilities, academic libraries need more effective workflows, policies, standards, and practices to ensure that they can support the creation, discovery, access, preservation, and reproducibility of 3D data sets. This study uses nominal group technique with invited experts across several disciplines and sectors to identify common challenges in the creation and re-use of 3D data for the purpose of developing library strategy for supporting curation of 3D data. This article identifies staffing needs for 3D imaging; alignment with IT resources; the roll of archivists in addressing unique challenges posed by these datasets; the importance of data annotation, metadata, and transparency for research integrity and reproducibility; and features for storage, access, and management to facilitate re-use by researchers and educators. Participants identified three main challenges for supporting 3D data that align with the strengths of libraries: 1) development of crosswalks and aggregation tools for discipline-specific metadata models, data dictionaries for 3D research, and aggregation tools for expanding discovery; 2) development of an open source viewer that supports streaming and annotation on archival formats of 3D models and makes archival master files accessible, while also serving derivative files based on user requirements; and 3) widespread of adoption of better documentation and technical metadata for image capture and modeling processes in order to support replicability of research, reproducibility of models, and transparency of scientific process.

Practices, Challenges, and Prospects of Big Data Curation: a Case Study in Geoscience

Suzhen Chen, Bin Chen, Dr. — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 14:20:27 +0000

Open and persistent access to past, present, and future scientific data is fundamental for transparent and reproducible data-driven research. The scientific community is now facing both challenges and opportunities caused by the growingly complex disciplinary data systems. Concerted efforts from domain experts, information professionals, and Internet technology experts are essential to ensure the accessibility and interoperability of the big data. Here we review current practices in building and managing big data within the context of large data infrastructure, using geoscience cyberinfrastructure such as Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA) and EarthCube as a case study. Geoscience is a data-rich discipline with a rapid expansion of sophisticated and diverse digital data sets. Having started to embrace the digital age, the community have applied big data and data mining tools into the new type of research. We also identified current challenges, key elements, and prospects to construct a more robust and future-proof big data infrastructure for research and publication for the future, as well as the roles, qualifications, and opportunities for librarians/information professionals in the data era.

Developing a Data Management Consultation Service for Faculty Researchers: a Case Study from a Large Midwestern Public University

Virginia A Dressler, Kristin Yeager, Elizabeth Richardson — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 09:57:14 +0100

To inform the development of data management services, a library research team at Kent State University conducted a survey of all tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty about their data management practices and perceptions. The methodology and results will be presented in the article, as well as how this information was used to inform future work in the library’s internal working group. Recommendations will be presented that other academic libraries could model in order to develop similar services at their institutions. Personal anecdotes are included that help ascertain current practices and sentiments around research data from the perspective of the researcher. The article addresses the particular needs of a large Midwestern U.S. academic campus, which are not currently reflected in literature on the topic.

Research Data Management in a Cultural Heritage Organisation

Tom Drysdale — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 14:58:29 +0000

Research is a core function of cultural heritage organisations. Inevitably, the undertaking of research by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the GLAM sector) leads to the creation of vast quantities of research data. Yet despite growing recognition that research data must be managed if it is to be exploited effectively, and in spite of increasing understanding of research data management practices and needs, particularly in the higher education sector, knowledge of research data management in cultural heritage organisations remains extremely limited. This paper represents an attempt to address the limited awareness of research data management in the cultural heritage sector. It presents the results of a data management audit conducted at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) in 2018. The study reveals that research data management at HRP is underdeveloped, while highlighting some causes for optimism. The results of the study are compared to the results of similar studies conducted in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), highlighting the many discrepancies in the ways that research data is managed at HRP and in the HE sector. Recognition of these differences and similarities, it is argued, is necessary for the development of better research data management practices and tools for the heritage sector.

Assessing Metadata and Curation Quality

Rebecca Grant, Graham Smith, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 20:30:35 +0000

Since 2017, the publisher Springer Nature has provided an optional Research Data Support service to help researchers deposit and curate data that support their peer-reviewed publications. This service builds on a Research Data Helpdesk, which since 2016 has provided support to authors and editors who need advice on the options available for sharing their research data. In this paper, we describe a short project which aimed to facilitate an objective assessment of metadata quality, undertaken during the development of a third-party curation service for researchers (Research Data Support). We provide details on the single-blind user-testing that was undertaken, and the results gathered during this experiment. We also briefly describe the curation services which have been developed and introduced following an initial period of testing and piloting.

Human Security Informatics, Global Grand Challenges and Digital Curation

Anne J. Gilliland, James Lowry — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 07:18:25 +0100

This paper argues that addressing humanitarian issues and concerns about social and societal inequities that are integral to many societal grand challenges needs to become a concerted and sustained focus of digital curation. It proposes a new framing emanating out of the archival and record-keeping community – Human Security Informatics (HSI) – for human and humanitarian-centered rather than data, artifact or research-centered digital curation research and development. Human security is proposed as a new concept that promotes the protection and advancement of individuals and communities. It prioritizes individual agency and rights, and human-centered and multidisciplinary approaches that support democratization, transparency and accountability in trans- and supra-national governance and policy-making. Within this ethos, HSI specifically targets data, documentary, record-keeping and other accountability and evidentiary components of societal grand challenges. In so doing it necessarily highlights curation grand challenges, and demands the reorientation of some fundamental assumptions of digital curation relating to technological, economic and policy infrastructure priorities and standards, trust, scale, universality and content-centricity. To illustrate its argument, two research endeavors are discussed. The first is an Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) study that analyzed six areas of societal grand challenges and identified key, and often overlooked, areas where HSI could and should contribute. The analysis also surfaced grand challenges facing the digital curation community itself, many with particular applicability to digital curation capacity, processes and priorities in bureaucratic archives. The second is the Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Project, an example of wide-ranging HSI research that is focused on data, social media content and record-keeping, as well as on individual human rights in and to records and documentation. In both examples the paper identifies several specific areas of relevance to digital curation where an HSI approach would be appropriate.

Improving the Reproducibility of LaTeX Documents by Enriching Figures with Embedded Scripts and Data

Christian Thomas Jacobs — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 16:37:27 +0000

The introduction of open-access data policies by research councils, the enforcement of best practices, and the deployment of persistent online repositories have enabled datasets which support results in scientific papers to become more widely accessible. Unfortunately, despite this advancement in the curation/publishing workflow, the data-driven figures within a paper often remain difficult to reproduce. Plotting or analysis scripts rarely accompany the manuscript or any associated software release; and even if they do, it may be unclear exactly which version was used. Furthermore, the precise commands and parameters used to execute the scripts are often not included in a README file or in the paper itself. This paper introduces a new open-source digital curation tool, Pynea, for improving the reproducibility of LaTeX documents. Each figure within a document is enriched by automatically embedding the plotting script and data files required to generate it, such that it can be regenerated by readers of the paper in the future. The command used to execute the plotting script is also added to the figure's metadata, along with details of the specific version of the script used (if the script is tracked with the Git version control system). If the document is to be recompiled with a figure that has since changed, or had its plotting script or data files modified, the figure is regenerated such that the author can be confident that the latest version of the figure and its dependencies are included.

A Class Focused Approach to Research Outputs and Policy Literature Metadata

Les Kneebone — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 22:07:58 +0000

Successful research object sharing requires that systems and users understand the structure, semantics and rules that govern a given research object collection.

A number of metadata standards define ontologies and vocabularies for consistent expression of research object semantics. Supporting, clarifying and sometimes extending these standards are metadata application profiles (MAPs). MAPs play a key role defining metadata element cardinality and data types. MAPs may also mandate or recommend controlled vocabularies, where metadata standards have not already mentioned these in formal range declarations, encoding schemes and semantics that are to be consumed by external systems. MAPs also guide design options for in-house systems and workflows. In this paper, development of a draft MAP for grey-literature policy and research collections is discussed. A focus of the discussion is the considerations around selection and adoption of metadata standards given the research data and literature communities in the APO stakeholder map.

This paper presents a work-in-progress version of a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) candidate. The Analysis & Policy Observatory Metadata Application Profile (APO-MAP) takes research object class structure as a starting point and considers class model options, especially given the availability of registry services and Persistent Indenter (PID) systems. The discussion finds that MAP development progresses towards a best fit that balances the need to adopt widely supported standards, local business drivers, and community acceptance.

Building an Aotearoa New Zealand-wide Digital Curation Community of Practice

Jessica Moran, Floran Feltham, Valerie Love — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 12:06:56 +0000

How do you build awareness and capability for digital curation knowledge and experience across a country? The National Library of New Zealand has a statutory role in supporting and advancing the work of Aotearoa New Zealand libraries to ensure documentary heritage and taonga is collected and preserved across the country’s memory system. This role includes supporting the collecting and curation of born-digital content. Aotearoa New Zealand’s Gallery Library Archive Museum (GLAM) sector is small but varied and diverse, so requires a flexible and adaptive plan to grow experience and capability in this area. This paper will describe the background research undertaken to gain a better understanding of the current environment, describe the development and delivery of pilot training in managing born-digital archival content, and outline our next steps. Driving this effort has been two foundational principles: 1) theory and practice are always in conversation with each other and practical hands-on experience is as important as theoretical knowledge and understanding; and 2) the work of growing capability should be done in a spirt of collaboration and partnership, meeting each other as equals and learning from each other.

Experimental Data Curation at Large Instrument Facilities with Open Source Software

Line Pouchard, Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Stuart I Campbell — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 10:22:22 +0100

The National Synchrotron Light Source II operating at Brookhaven National Laboratory since 2014 for the US Department of Energy is one of the newest and brightest storage-ring synchrotron facility in the world. NSLS-II, like other facilities, provides pre-processing of the raw data and some analysis capabilities to its users. We describe the research collaborations and open source infrastructure developed at large instrument facilities such as NSLS-II for the purpose of curating high value scientific data along the early stages of the data lifecycle. Data acquisition and curation tasks include storing experiment configuration, detector metadata, raw data acquisition with infrastructure that converts proprietary instrument formats to industry standards. In addition, we describe a specific effort for discovering sample information at NSLS-II and tracing the provenance of analysis performed on acquired images. We show that curation tasks must be embedded into software along the data life cycle for effectiveness and ease of use, and that loosely defined collaborations evolve around shared open source tools. Finally we discuss best practices for experimental metadata capture in such facilities, data access and the new challenges of scale and complexity posed by AI-based discovery for the synthesis of new materials.

Towards Trusted Identities for Swiss Researchers and their Data

Julien A. Raemy, René Martin Schneider — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:14:01 +0000

In this paper we report on efforts to enhance the Swiss persistent identifier (PID) ecosystem. We will firstly describe the current situation and the need for improvement in order to describe in full detail the steps undertaken to create a Swiss-wide model. A case study was undertaken by using several data sets from the domains of art and design in the context of the ICOPAD project. We will provide a set of recommendations to enable a PID service that could mint Archival Resource Key (ARK) identifiers or a flavour of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) as complement to Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). We will conclude with some remarks concerning the transferability of this approach to other areas and the requirements for a national hub for PID management in Switzerland.

Developing Culturally Competent Data Publication Resources

Ryan Stoker, Gene Melzack, Jennifer McLean — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 07:18:25 +0100

It is increasingly common for researchers to publish their datasets in open, mediated, or restricted form as a research output. The process of publishing data is complex and there are few guides that are practical or easy to understand. To bridge this gap, the Digital Curation and Data team at the University of Sydney Library initiated a project to develop applied data publication resources. To reflect current University and Library strategies, the team expanded the project to include a cultural competence review of each newly developed resource in order to reflect on the cultural biases that had gone into its creation and the ways in which the resource might appear through alternative cultural lenses, initially focusing on the data publication needs for research relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It may be especially challenging for researchers who are working with culturally sensitive data to find resources that are easy to use and relevant. One initial goal of this project is to ensure that researchers, students and staff can support the ethical and culturally appropriate publication of data relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, communities, and knowledges. The team reviewed prototyped resources with researchers who conduct research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to assess their usefulness and identify gaps. Resources are now being updated to reflect feedback, and additional resources will also be created. The intention is to continue to integrate cultural competence into the University of Sydney’s data curation and publication services and to expand this process to include wider cultural perspectives.

Organising RDM and Open Science Services

Anne Sunikka — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 12:01:23 +0000

This paper describes how the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture launched an initiative on research data management and open data, open access publishing, and open and collaborative ways of working in 2014. Most of the universities and research institutions took part in the collaborative initiative building new tools and training material for the Finnish research needs. Measures taken by one university, Aalto University, are described in detail and analysed, and compared with the activities taking place in other universities.

The focus of this paper is in the changing roles of experts at Aalto University, and organisational transformation that offers possibilities to serve academic personnel better. Various ways of building collaboration and arranging services are described, and their benefits and drawbacks are discussed.