Summer 2017 - Spring 2019 Data Management Strategic Agenda: Final Report

Between Summer 2017 - Spring 2019, Albertsons Library’s Research Data Management Group worked on implementing a strategic agenda. Below is a report of the activities undertaken in response to that plan. In particular, the work of the group has been shaped and impacted by several key factors: Over the past two years, the group had several changes in membership with two members departing, one new member joining, and another assuming additional job duties. Unlike earlier configurations of the group which focused more on exploration and development, the Research Data Management Group had evolved to the point where we are delivering services. As a result, changes in membership have a greater impact on the work and focus of the group. As the university has wrestled with providing support for research data, the focus and priorities of other campus units has moved the Library’s group away from collaborative approaches and towards point-of-need interactions. This shift has furthered due to a limited ability for all partners to engage in shared goals. Beginning in fall 2019, the Research Data Management Group began to notice a change in direction with the inclusion of the library’s new data visualization librarian. As the group has adjusted its focus, we found our priorities and interests have also changed. It is expected that further shifting will occur as the new Head of Scholarly Communications and Data Management arrives and have identified managing those changes as important goals to accomplish in the next two years. At this stage, the Research Data Management group has determined it wants to build upon our previous strategic agenda by concentrating on establishing a sustainable service model and focusing efforts on clear areas that we can affect, particularly in regards to external stakeholders

Research Data Management Stone Soup: Gauging Team Competencies

This recipe incorporates ingredients from several competency documents designed by an array of library groups to create an exercise that helps to bolster skills and services sur- rounding research data management (RDM). This assessment allows the library to better understand and visualize the strengths and gaps in knowledge necessary to effectively run an RDM team creating an ever-changing, collaborative “stone soup.

Data Management Plan for Investigating Early Mathematics Learning Opportunities for Children with Disabilities in the Home Learning Environment

Data Management Plan for 2021 NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Program Proposa

Riverside-Normal City Historic Design Guidelines

Professor JP Halls ARCH 441/541 Preservation policy course compiled a set of historic design guidelines as neighborhood stakeholders plan to create a local historic district for a portion of the neighborhood and to assist in the continued long-term architectural preservation of the Riverside neighborhood

The Tetragnatha kauaiensis genome sheds light on the origins of genomic novelty in spider

Spiders (Araneae) have a diverse spectrum of morphologies, behaviors, and physiologies. Attempts to understand the genomic-basis of this diversity are often hindered by their large, heterozygous, and AT-rich genomes with high repeat content resulting in highly fragmented, poor-quality assemblies. As a result, the key attributes of spider genomes, including gene family evolution, repeat content, and gene function, remain poorly understood. Here, we used Illumina and Dovetail Chicago technologies to sequence the genome of the long-jawed spider Tetragnatha kauaiensis, producing an assembly distributed along 3,925 scaffolds with an N50 of ∼2 Mb. Using comparative genomics tools, we explore genome evolution across available spider assemblies. Our findings suggest that the previously reported and vast genome size variation in spiders is linked to the different representation and number of transposable elements. Using statistical tools to uncover gene-family level evolution, we find expansions associated with the sensory perception of taste, immunity, and metabolism. In addition, we report strikingly different histories of chemosensory, venom, and silk gene families, with the first two evolving much earlier, affected by the ancestral whole genome duplication in Arachnopulmonata (∼450 Ma) and exhibiting higher numbers. Together, our findings reveal that spider genomes are highly variable and that genomic novelty may have been driven by the burst of an ancient whole genome duplication, followed by gene family and transposable element expansion

From scientific article to press release to media coverage: advocating alcohol abstinence and democratising risk in a story about alcohol and pregnancy

In this article, we follow the approach taken by Riesch and Spiegalhalter in "Careless pork costs lives": Risk stories from science to press release to media published in this journal, and offer an assessment of one example of a 'risk story'. Using content and thematic qualitative analysis, we consider how the findings of an article 'Fetal Alcohol Exposure and IQ at Age 8: Evidence from a Population-Based Birth-Cohort Study' were framed in the article itself, the associated press release, and the subsequent extensive media coverage. We contextualise this consideration of a risk story by discussing a body of work that critically engages with the development and global proliferation of efforts to advocate for alcohol abstinence to pregnant (and pre-pregnant) women. This work considers the 'democratisation' of risk, a term used to draw attention to the expansion of the definition of the problem of drinking in pregnancy to include any drinking and all women. We show here how this risk story contributed a new dimension to the democratisation of risk through claims that were made about uncertainty and certainty. A central argument we make concerns the contribution of the researchers themselves (not just lobby groups or journalists) to this outcome. We conclude that the democratisation of risk was advanced in this case not simply through journalists exaggerating and misrepresenting research findings, but that communication to the press and the initial interpretation of findings played their part. We suggest that this risk story raises concerns about the accuracy of reporting of research findings, and about the communication of unwarrantedly worrying messages to pregnant women about drinking alcohol

Highly Contiguous Assemblies of 101 Drosophilid Genomes

Over 100 years of studies in Drosophila melanogaster and related species in the genus Drosophila have facilitated key discoveries in genetics, genomics, and evolution. While high-quality genome assemblies exist for several species in this group, they only encompass a small fraction of the genus. Recent advances in long-read sequencing allow high-quality genome assemblies for tens or even hundreds of species to be efficiently generated. Here, we utilize Oxford Nanopore sequencing to build an open community resource of genome assemblies for 101 lines of 93 drosophilid species encompassing 14 species groups and 35 sub-groups. The genomes are highly contiguous and complete, with an average contig N50 of 10.5 Mb and greater than 97% BUSCO completeness in 97/101 assemblies. We show that Nanopore-based assemblies are highly accurate in coding regions, particularly with respect to coding insertions and deletions. These assemblies, along with a detailed laboratory protocol and assembly pipelines, are released as a public resource and will serve as a starting point for addressing broad questions of genetics, ecology, and evolution at the scale of hundreds of species