Facilitating Access to Restricted Data

The decision to allow users access to restricted and protected data is based on the development of trust in the user by data repositories. In this article, I propose a model of the process of trust development at restricted data repositories, a model which emphasizes the increasing levels of trust dependent on prior interactions between repositories and users. I find that repositories develop trust in their users through the interactions of four dimensions – promissory, experience, competence, and goodwill – that consider distinct types of researcher expertise and the role of a researcher’s reputation in the trust process. However, the processes used by repositories to determine a level of trust corresponding to data access are inconsistent and do not support the sharing of trusted users between repositories to maximize efficient yet secure access to restricted research data. I highlight the role of a researcher’s reputation as an important factor in trust development and trust transference, and discuss the implications of modelling the restricted data access process as a process of trust development

Complementary Data as Metadata: Building Context for the Reuse of Video Records of Practice

Data reuse is often dependent on context external to the data. At times, this context is actually additional data that helps data reusers better assess and/or understand the target data upon which they are focused. We refer to these data as complementary data and define these as data external to the target data which could be used as evidence in their own right. In this paper, we specifically we focus on video records of practice in education. Records of practice are a type of data that more broadly document events surrounding teaching and learning. Video records of practice are an interesting case of data reuse as they can be extensive (e.g., days or weeks of video of a classroom), result in large files sizes, and require both metadata and other complementary data in order for reusers to understand the events depicted in the video. Through our mixed methods study, consisting of a survey of data reusers in 4 repositories and 44 in-depth interviews, we identified the types of complementary data that assist reusers of video records of practice for either teaching and/or research. While there were similarities in the types of complementary data identified as important to have when reusing VROP, the rationales and motivations for seeking out particular complementary data differed depending on whether the intended use was for teaching or research. While metadata is an important and valuable means of describing data for reuse, data’s meaning is often constructed through comparison, verification, or elucidation in reference to other data. &nbsp