Where Do We Go From Here: Choosing a Framework for Assessing Research Data Services and Training

Research data management has become a critical issue for campus researchers, funding agencies, and libraries, who have made substantial investments of time, energy, and resources into support for managing and sharing data. As data management programs proliferate, however, assessment of research data services has become a notorious challenge for libraries. How can we know—and demonstrate—that our efforts are having an impact, and how can we learn to make them even more effective? In this session, we will present a survey of several frameworks for assessing research data management services. We will lead a discussion about the application of different frameworks for assessing or auditing existing skill sets, external facing services, and capacity to support an array of research data services. This discussion will be grounded in a demonstration of how we applied one framework to audit the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries’s “training ground” model, which serves the dual purpose of developing competencies within our librarians and supporting researchers in their needs to manage, preserve, and share research assets. Through an active discussion of our efforts, and the efforts of libraries around the world, we can chart a course for effective research data management that can help guide libraries already deep into the process as well as those just getting their feet wet. Note: This presentation and conference paper is derived in part from the following publication: Davis, H. M., & Cross, W. M. (2015).Using a data management plan review service as a training ground for librarians. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(2), eP1243

Making students eat their greens: information skills for chemistry students

yesEmployers are increasingly requiring a range of “soft” skills from chemistry graduates, including the ability to search for and critically evaluate information. This paper discusses the issues around encouraging chemistry students to engage with information skills and suggests curricular changes which may help to “drip-feed” information skills into degree programmes

Radical Librarian-Technologists

Librarians may be finding themselves in the role of the technologist that supports students and faculty in Internet security, censorship circumvention, and supports whistleblowers and journalists. This paper looks at three cases where librarians present and teach technologies with these aims: the Tor anonymity network, secure communication in the field of journalism, and the librarian’s place in the maker/hackerspace movement

Unruly Records: Personal Archives, Sociotechnical Infrastructure, and Archival Practice

Personal records have long occupied a complicated space within archival theory and practice. The archival profession, as it is practiced in the United States today, developed with organizational records, such as those created by governments and businesses, in mind. Personal records were considered to fall beyond the bounds of archival work and were primarily cared for by libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Since the mid-20th century, this divide has become less pronounced, and it has become common to find personal records within archival institutions. As a result of these conditions in the development of the profession, the archivists who work with personal records have had to reconcile the specific characteristics of personal materials with theoretical and practical approaches that were designed not only to accommodate organizational records but to explicitly exclude personal records. These conditions have been further complicated by the continually changing technological landscape in which personal records are now created. As ownership of personal computers, access to the World Wide Web, and the use of networked social platforms have grown, personal records have increasingly come to be created, stored, and accessed within complex socio-technical systems. The infrastructures that support personal digital record creation today precipitate new methods and strategies, and an abundance of new questions, for the archivists who are responsible for collecting and preserving digital cultural heritage. This dissertation considers how both the history of excluding personal records in the archival profession and the socio-technical systems that support contemporary personal record creation impact archival practice today. This research considers archival approaches to working with personal records created within three environments: personal computers, the open web, and networked social platforms. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to reevaluate the role that personal records have previously occupied, and to center the personal in archival practice today

Radical Librarian-Technologists

Librarians may be finding themselves in the role of the technologist that supports students and faculty in Internet security, censorship circumvention, and supports whistleblowers and journalists. This paper looks at three cases where librarians present and teach technologies with these aims: the Tor anonymity network, secure communication in the field of journalism, and the librarian’s place in the maker/hackerspace movement

Archives Management in Support Official Administration in Toho Subdistrict Head Office, Mempawah Regency

This study aims to analyze and describe the management of archives in support of administrative order at the Toho sub-district office, Toho district, Mempawah regency. This problem was chosen to look at the issues that exist in the management of archives or archives that exist, especially in the Toho District office of Mempawah Regency, especially those related to the problem of managing letters and arranging archives at the Toho Sub-district office because there are phenomena that indicate where in the management, mail or control. And the arrangement of the archives is still not done well; in other words, it has not been done as desired, or there are still some obstacles, especially those related to archive problems. Therefore, the archive is essential in supporting the orderly administration in the office so that there are no archiving problems that will make the paperwork in the office not recorded neatly or adequately. The results of this study indicate that the management, control, and arrangement of archives or archives at the Toho sub-district office are still not carried out properly, so an understanding of adequate archival equipment procedures is needed so that activities in archives management can be carried out as well as possible. This must be guided by the Governor's Regulation No. 453 of 2005 concerning reasonable and correct archival procedures

Aggregating Temporal Forensic Data Across Archival Digital Media

In this paper, I introduce a method for generating an aggregated timeline of file system activity derived from the disk images of archival digital media. Using a collection of 1,059 floppy disks from the Woody and Steina Vasulka collection as a case study for this process, I evaluate the technical issues of the dataset and describe the variances in date and time use for different file systems and the operating systems that use them. I discuss the utility of the timeline as a research and archival aid, and conclude that such timelines are promising resources which can provide a wider evaluative context for collections of digital media

Safety in Numbers: Distributed Digital Preservation Networks

It has long been recognized that there is safety in numbers and that redundancy enhancessurvivability. This principle has been applied in many spheres of human activity, fromengineering to military science. It is now being applied in librarianship and digital preservation,through the creation of distributed digital preservation (DDP) networks using the open-sourceLOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) software. This paper describes two PrivateLOCKSS Networks (PLNs) based in North America: the MetaArchive Cooperative, aninternational preservation network serving more than 50 member institutions in the U.S., Brazil,Spain, and the U.K.; and the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet), a state-basedpreservation network serving academic libraries, public libraries, and the state archives inAlabama. The paper argues that PLNs offer a technologically robust, administrativelymanageable, and economically sustainable way to protect digital assets and ensure thecontinuity of digital libraries in the face of natural and man-made disasters