What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The Impact of Poor Data Management

This chapter highlights the importance of good data management practices by providing examples of problems a researcher may encounter when research data is poorly managed. It provides examples of actual situations when bad data management led to serious problems with data loss, research integrity, and worse. It also provides tips on how data management could have been done differently to encourage a more positive outcome

Planning Data Management Education Initiatives: Process, Feedback, and Future Directions

Educating researchers in sound data management skills is a hot topic in today’s data intensive research world. Librarians across the country and the world are taking the lead in offering this training to their campus research communities. In Fall, 2013, the Data Curation Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, held a one-day “Data Management Basics” Workshop geared towards graduate students in engineering and science disciplines based on the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum. Students were asked to complete a pre-workshop survey and a series of seven post-module surveys throughout the day. This article discusses the results of the survey feedback, the planning process, and elaborates on important variables in planning data management training initiatives, such as disciplinary adjustments and time constraints. The article concludes with a discussion of the author’s future plans for providing training initiatives based on the feedback he received

Selection and Appraisal of Digital Research Datasets

As the currency of science, data are important to preserve. However, since scientific research is producing ever-increasing volumes of data, it is impossible to preserve it all. Even if it were, not every data set ought to be preserved. For this reason, academic libraries need policies with criteria governing which data sets will be preserved and how to appraise them against those criteria. Appraisal and selection policies are commonplace in academic libraries for other materials, but many do not have complementary policies for data sets. If data are to be preserved, then academic libraries must have clear and useful selection and appraisal policies to govern which data sets will be selected for preservation. This chapter discusses challenges to creating and executing an appraisal and selection policy. Important considerations are whether it should be a sub-section of the library’s overall material collection development policy or a separate policy on its own. Likewise, should it be more similar in scope and form to the library’s traditional collection development policy or more similar to a special collections appraisal and selection policy? Should the policy be comprehensive across the entire lifecycle from ingest to disposition or just cover ingest? This chapter discusses these issues and offer alternatives for libraries to consider. Furthermore, this chapter introduces and explains the range of selection criteria libraries may consider when developing policies. It discusses each important criteria in depth, such as scientific or historical value, scarcity, relevance to institutional mission, and others. Lastly, it discusses life cycle management of data sets, such as periodic refreshing of files and determining when to deaccession data sets. Readers will find a thorough overview of the issues surrounding appraisal and selection of digital research data and will be equipped with the knowledge and resources to develop such policies in their institutions

Soil Quality as Affected by Hemp and Grain Production Systems in Western Kentucky

Since 2018, hemp cropping systems have become increasingly popular in Kentucky. However, there is limited data on soil’s behavior/changes under these management practices as compared to corn and soybean cultivation systems. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine soil characteristics including soil organic matter, bulk density, water holding capacity, macroporosity, and water at field capacity in hemp and grain cropping systems. The thirty undisturbed soil samples were collected from three different hemp fields and a corn, soybean, and a bare field adjacent to these hemp fields. Each field was located at Murray State University West Farm, Calloway County, KY. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) with LSD at 5% of significance was performed to analyze the data statistically. The detailed results from the study will be discussed in the presentation. The information from this research will be beneficial for producers and farm managers to predict the future of hemp production and corn-soybean-hemp crop rotation on the soil’s quality to promote sustainable agriculture

wâhkôtowin: A nehiyaw Ethical Analysis of Anti-Indigenous Racism in Canadian Nursing

Indigenous peoples in the settler state of Canada face racism on a daily basis, including in their interactions with nurses and the healthcare system. Canadian Nursing consistently fails to recognize their role in continuing to perpetrate anti-Indigenous racism. Many nurses are not taught enough about Indigenous history, settler colonialism and anti-racism to be able to recognize anti-Indigenous racism in practice, let alone effectively address it. Often the western based ethical principles nurses are taught in schools are weaponized against Indigenous peoples in practice. I propose using the nehiyaw (Cree) concept of wâhkôtowin as an ethical perspective that can help nurses tackle the problem of anti-Indigenous racism

Data Curation Education in Research Centers Poster

The volume of scientific data is growing exponentially across all scientific disciplines. Competent information professionals are needed to sort, catalog, store, and retrieve this data for future research and education requirements. In response to this need, the goal of the Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) project is to develop curriculum to educate information science students in the critical field of scientific data curation. Three masters degree students at University of Tennessee (UT) and three doctoral students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are completing year one of the program. Each brings to the field of data curation skills obtained from prior work in diverse scientific and engineering professions. In the summers of 2012 and 2013, the masters students will travel to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, to work alongside scientists and researchers and to experience the demands of data curation at the source of data creation. The NCAR experience will allow students to assimilate the skills learned from the Fundamentals in Data Curation course, which will be completed in Spring 2012. This poster session will display and demonstrate the goals, student achievements, and overall program performance by providing examples of the specific skill sets the students are obtaining, projects they are completing, and expected future milestones

Analysis of Events Governing the Meiotic Division in Mouse Spermatocytes

The meiotic division is essential for successful gametogenesis. However, many events occurring during male and female meiotic development remain poorly understood. While it is known that chromosomes must pair, recombine, and segregate to form gametes, critical questions remain. How and when do these events occur with respect to each other? What mechanisms monitor their developmental success? Insight into these questions is provided in this dissertation, using the mouse spermatocyte as a model. The purpose of this work is to aid in the overall understanding of mammalian meiosis. After an introduction into mammalian meiosis in Part I, a temporal order of events occurring during meiosis in the mouse spermatocyte is provided in Part II. The development of events such as chromosome pairing, spindle formation, and localization of cell cycle proteins was monitored using immunofluorescence. This work established a framework for which developmental progress can be monitored in normal and abnormal environments. In Part III, the MLH1-deficient mouse was used to study an abnormal G2/M transition. Spermatocytes lacking the DNA mismatch repair protein MLH1 are characterized by univalent chromosomes at metaphase I, and do not progress into the first anaphase. Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, was seen in Mlh1-/- metaphase spermatocytes. In Part IV, spermatocytes heterozygous for Robertsonian-chromosome translocations were also used to study abnormalities in the G2/M transition. Many of these spermatocytes failed to properly pair homologous chromosomes during MI. Many metaphase spermatocytes also contained unaligned/lagging chromosomes. Apoptosis was seen in a large portion of the spermatocytes containing unaligned chromosomes, possibly in response to the activation of a spindle checkpoint mechanism. Although functional sperm are produced in these mice, many were found to be aneuploid for chromosomes involved in Robertsonian translocations. The findings of this dissertation aid in the overall understanding of meiotic development and regulation, which is discussed in the closing Part V. By the establishment of a meiotic timeline, genetic abnormalities can be and were studied in the context of normal meiotic progression. Situations in which meiotic abnormalities arise are provided in Parts IV and V. These findings provide insight into the consequences of chromosomal abnormalities and failure in the DNA repair mechanism during meiosis, possibly reflecting the creation of errors in our own species