18 research outputs found
A Behavioral Approach to Understanding the Git Experience
The Investigating and Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE) project is multi-track study focused on understanding the uses of Git by students, faculty, and staff working in academic research institutions as well as the ways source code repositories and their associated contextual ephemera can be better preserved. This research, in turn, has implications regarding how to support Git in the scholarly process, how version control systems contribute to reproducibility, and how Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals can support Git through instruction and sustainability efforts. In this paper, we focus on a subset of our larger project and take a deep look at what code hosting platforms offer researchers in terms of productivity and collaboration. For this portion, a survey, focus groups, and user experience interviews were conducted to gain an understanding of how and why scholarly researchers use Version Control Systems (VCS) as well as some of the pain points in learning and using VCS for daily work
Bridging the Gap: Improving Data Services through Cross-Campus Collaboration
Objective: New York University (NYU) Libraries provide research data services to diverse communities across several campuses. Until recently, they have worked mostly independent of each other. At the main campus, NYU Data Services offers workshops, individual and group consultations, and traveling âroad showsâ on data management to the larger NYU community. At a separate medical center campus, the NYU Health Sciences Library (NYUHSL) supports a data catalog, data management education, and individualized lab support. Finally, Databrary, which is connected to NYUâs Digital Library Technology Services, provides a repository for behavioral and learning science researchers working primarily with video data to store, manage, and share the raw materials of their work with their colleagues. This poster will discuss how these disparate services have worked more closely together by identifying overlap, making connections between service offerings, and sharing knowledge and resources around data. This initiative better enriches the overall mission and strategy of NYU libraries to serve its student and research communities.
Methods: To ensure the better coordination of these data services, we began to hold regular, bi-monthly meetings to discuss strategies for improving data education material, integrating an institutional data catalog created by NYUHSL with main campus systems, and providing data-related outreach to institutional stakeholders. These groups have also collaborated on planning and hosting events on data-related topics including using Databrary, reproducibility in science, and data visualization. Finally, a resource sharing system was instituted across campuses for library faculty to collaborate and improve upon the instructional design of data management education, create outreach materials, and share ongoing project documentation.
Results: The new collaboration between NYU Data Services, NYUHSL and special projects like Databrary has served to break down existing institutional silos to provide better research and educational data services to NYUâs student and research communities. This collaboration has been essential for improving upon existing services, identifying new opportunities to support the data needs of institutional stakeholders, and providing increased levels of outreach. By fostering a better understanding of what data services are available across campuses through this ongoing collaboration, we are better able to identify and support our communitiesâ data needs.
Conclusion: Providing data management, curation, and storage services for a diverse and dynamic research community on campus is a demanding task that requires a distributed effort. Each service fills different gaps for researchers at varying stages of their research practices, though without inter-department communication there was decidedly less impact and reach by everyone. By collaborating and opening a line of communication, we have built a better understanding of how we can interact to provide stronger support to the student and research communities across campuses
Whatâs Wrong with Digital Stewardship: Evaluating the Organization of Digital Preservation Programs from Practitionersâ Perspectives
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance surveyed practitioners in 2012 and again in 2017 to gauge, among other things, how satisfied they were with their organizationsâ digital preservation function. This study seeks to understand what causes the high and rising levels of dissatisfaction that practitioners reported. We interviewed 21 digital stewards and asked them to describe the organizational context in which they work; to reflect on what aspects of their organizationsâ approach to digital preservation are working well and which are not; and to evaluate necessary areas of improvement. We identified experiences that were common among participants using a qualitative research methodology based on phenomenology. These conversations revealed that practitioners largely consider digital stewardship values and goals to be misunderstood at an organizational level, and demonstrated that the absence of a long-term vision for digital stewardship disempowers practitioners
Introduction to Reproducibility
Intro slides for a session on research reproducibility at PASIG NYC
ARCHIVING THE SCHOLARLY GIT EXPERIENCE - iPRES 2019 Amsterdam
Our poster will reflect our recent efforts to understand the workflows and policies needed for the long-term preservation of code, annotations, and other scholarly ephemera from Git hosting platforms. We undertook an environmental scan of the existing processes and tools for capturing and actively archiving Git data and their associated, supplemental materials. We will present the results of this broad environmental scan, covering a wide variety of approaches, organizations, and workflows that could possibly be used to create a baseline on which to build and expand archival tools. Our efforts are geared toward acquiring, archiving, and providing permanent access to source code, and the materials around it, and argue that the whole should be considered part of the scholarly record
Research Data Management Among Life Sciences Faculty: Implications for Library Service
Objective: This paper aims to inform on opportunities for librarians to assist faculty with research data management by examining practices and attitudes among life sciences faculty at a tier one research university.
Methods: The authors issued a survey to estimate actual and perceived research data management needs of New York University (NYU) life sciences faculty in order to understand how the library could best contribute to the research life cycle.
Results: Survey responses indicate that over half of the respondents were aware of publisher and funder mandates, and most are willing to share their data, but many indicated they do not utilize data repositories. Respondents were largely unaware of data services available through the library, but the majority were open to considering such services. Survey results largely mimic those of similar studies, in that storing data (and the subsequent ability to share it) is the most easily recognized barrier to sound data management practices.
Conclusions: At NYU, as with other institutions, the library is not immediately recognized as a valuable partner in managing research output. This study suggests that faculty are largely unaware of, but are open to, existent library services, indicating that immediate outreach efforts should be aimed at promoting them
Collaborating to Create a Culture of Data Stewardship
Our poster discusses the ways in which we collaborate across the institution to provide comprehensive data management services by identifying overlap, making connections between service offerings, and sharing knowledge and resources around data to enrich the overall mission and strategy of NYU libraries to serve its student and research communities.The new collaboration between NYU Data Services, NYUHSL and special projects like Databrary has served to break down existing institutional silos to provide better research and educational data services to NYUâs student and research communities. This collaboration has been essential for improving upon existing services, identifying new opportunities to support the data needs of institutional stakeholders, and providing increased levels of outreach. By fostering a better understanding of what data services are available across campuses through this ongoing collaboration, we are better able to identify and support our communitiesâ data needs
Collaborating to Create a Culture of Data Stewardship
Our poster discusses the ways in which we collaborate across the institution to provide comprehensive data management services by identifying overlap, making connections between service offerings, and sharing knowledge and resources around data to enrich the overall mission and strategy of NYU libraries to serve its student and research communities.The new collaboration between NYU Data Services, NYUHSL and special projects like Databrary has served to break down existing institutional silos to provide better research and educational data services to NYUâs student and research communities. This collaboration has been essential for improving upon existing services, identifying new opportunities to support the data needs of institutional stakeholders, and providing increased levels of outreach. By fostering a better understanding of what data services are available across campuses through this ongoing collaboration, we are better able to identify and support our communitiesâ data needs