Units of Evidence for Analyzing Subdisciplinary Difference in Data Practice Studies

Digital libraries (DLs) are adapting to accommodate research data and related services. The complexities of this new content spans the elements of DL development, and there are questions concerning data selection, service development, and how best to align these with local, institutional initiatives for cyberinfrastructure, data-intensive research, and data stewardship. Small science disciplines are of particular relevance due to the prevalence of this mode of research in the academy, and the anticipated magnitude of data production. To support data acquisition into DLs – and subsequent data reuse – there is a need for new knowledge on the range and complexities inherent in practice-data-curation arrangements for small science research. We present a flexible methodological approach crafted to generate data units to analyze these relationships and facilitate crossdisciplinary comparisons.Library Services (LG-06-07-0032-07) and National Science Foundation (OCI-0830976).is peer reviewe

Graduate Curriculum for Biological Information Specialists: A Key to Integration of Scale in Biology

Scientific data problems do not stand in isolation. They are part of a larger set of challenges associated with the escalation of scientific information and changes in scholarly communication in the digital environment. Biologists in particular are generating enormous sets of data at a high rate, and new discoveries in the biological sciences will increasingly depend on the integration of data across multiple scales. This work will require new kinds of information expertise in key areas. To build this professional capacity we have developed two complementary educational programs: a Biological Information Specialist (BIS) masters degree and a concentration in Data Curation (DC). We believe that BISs will be central in the development of cyberinfrastructure and information services needed to facilitate interdisciplinary and multi-scale science. Here we present three sample cases from our current research projects to illustrate areas in which we expect information specialists to make important contributions to biological research practice

Foster Mohrhardt: Connecting the Traditional World of Libraries and the Emerging World of Information Science

Foster Edward Mohrhardt was a librarian in federal libraries for much of his career and served as the director of the National Agricultural Library from 1954 to 1968. Throughout his long library career, he used the freedom of his directorship to participate in a variety of high-level projects across organizations. This role served both to advance the prestige of the National Agricultural Library and to promote his personal goal to develop national and international library networks to support scientifi c communication. He worked actively throughout his career to bring librarians and documentalists together to address information problems outlined by practicing scientists and policymakers at a time when there was contention and competition between librarianship and documentation, which was then emerging as a new discipline. Mohrhardt considered librarianship an international endeavor, requiring cooperation and creativity to increase access to information produced in other countries. He saw libraries as essential to the growth of science and successful service necessarily tied to the development of national and international information systems. He mobilized people and resources to develop agricultural and research libraries and expand librarianship throughout the world. In light of current trends in scientifi c communication, and reemerging tensions concerning the role of libraries in information systems development, Mohrhardt???s work is a signifi cant model for increasing the prevalence of library expertise in current scientifi c data management activities. As a diplomat who bridged librarianship and documentation, his career as a librarian and an organizational leader deserves renewed attention.published or submitted for publicatio

Introduction: Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future

Institutional repositories (IRs) currently exist in a rapidly shifting landscape without a clear consensus on their role in the academic environment. Low self-archiving rates have dampened hopes that IRs would have an impact on scholarly publishing models. Preservation programs, a stated goal of many IRs, are often not well established. In many cases, IRs are not part of a larger vision for services the library can provide to the institution, but are isolated projects without a strong base of support. Institutions are beginning to explore the role of IRs in the collection of materials like data sets. Given this environment, where will IRs be in the next five or ten years? This issue of Library Trends contains an impressive slate of articles from prominent practitioners and researchers in the field, who offer a range of perspectives on the current state of IRs in academic institutions and reflections on their future.published or submitted for publicatio

Data Curation in LIS Education and Libraries

Presentation for the ALA Annual Meeting, July 13, 2009, for the ACRL Science and Technology Section panel: Big Science, Little Science, E-Science: The Science Librarian’s Role in the ConversationIMLS grant # RE-05-06-0036-06unpublishednot peer reviewe

Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data

It has been suggested that digital libraries are more like archives than libraries and that library science cannot provide a theoretical foundation for handling digital data. We assert, however, that library and information science (LIS) provides much of the theoretical framework needed for digital libraries, and for data curation, and is a major source of vital research findings and professional education. This is a natural outcome of the LIS focus on the purposeful collection and organization of information and provision of services to support users, and on the considerable scale of relevant research activities long underway. The need for LIS contributions to the field is evident in results from our current research on scholarly and scientific data, digital collections, and our experiences with the Data Curation Educational Program (DCEP) masters and continuing education activities.Funded in part by Institute of Museum and Library Servicespublished or submitted for publicatio

Relating data practices, types, and curation functions: An empirically derived framework.

We present a general conceptual framework that maps relationships and dependencies among scientific data practices, types of data produced and used, and associated curation activities. As part of the Data Conservancy initiative, the framework is being elaborated through empirical studies of data practices in the earth sciences and life science and validated against use cases as curatorial services are developed around data being prepared for ingest into the repository. The framework can be applied more broadly for identifying and representing curation requirements and to support description and assessment of existing or planned curation infrastructure and services. It will support full accounts of the data products and workflows required to maintain the coherence and context of complex data collections.Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-06-07-0032-07) and National Science Foundation (0830976)is peer reviewe

Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Notion of Data Level in Data Curation

Originally focused on scientific data, the data curation community is now taking up the curation problems of humanities data as well. Sharing concepts and terminology across these domains should be valuable for both the practice of data curation, and the education of data curation professionals. To convene a discussion of the possibilities we outline an exercise mapping NASA’s well-known four “data levels” to practices and concepts in traditional textual criticism.IMLS RE-05-08-0062-08published or submitted for publicatio

Supporting Biological Information Work: Research and Education for Digital Resources and Long-lived Data

New practices are emerging in all stages of biological research, from data collection through dissemination of results. In addition, libraries and museums are increasingly being called upon to become the long-term curators and stewards of the range of intellectual products and research data. Through a series of cooperative projects with biologists working in data-intensive and informatics-based domains, we have documented requirements for digital libraries, tool development, and data management techniques to support contemporary scientific practice. This research is now serving as the foundation for a new biological informatics master's program designed to train a new generation of Library and Information Science professionals to serve in scientific research environments. To respond to the qualitative changes in biological research and the specific workforce gaps identified in our research, we are developing this program as part of a campus-wide bioinformatics initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By providing access to experts from across the University who specialize in many areas of biology and information management, the program will train a new generation of Library and Information Science professionals to serve in scientific research environments.NSF-0222848NSF-IIS-0534567published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

Scientific Data Collections: Use in Scholarly Communication and Implications for Data Curation

127 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.The landscape of scientific production and scholarly communication is changing: Networked connectivity, the availability of data in digital forms and the development of computing tools are helping to bring about changes in the way science is conducted and communicated. These changes are having an impact on the range of scientific production and communication activities, including data collection, data management, and the publication and dissemination of primary research materials. Practices related to data (and by extension, data collections) are integral to scientific information work, and include activities such as the collection, transformation, processing, managing, sharing, preservation and archiving, accessing, and re-use of data. Understanding the nature of data-related practices and their relation to the production of scholarship is important for both theoretical and applied work in library and information science (LIS), as well as the emerging field of data curation. Data curation is the active and on-going management of data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education. If scientific data sets and collections are to be gathered and organized for long-term use, applicable theories will be needed to guide a variety of new and necessary practices for their management and preservation.This dissertation concerns the development and use of shared scientific data collections (SDCs), the roles and functions they perform in the conduct of scientific production and scholarly communication. Research on scholarly practices provides a foundation for the development of information systems, services, and tools to support the production of scholarship and science. Scientific Data Collections in particular are essential to the conduct of 21st Century science, and the availability of primary research data is likely to re-structure the knowledge formalization processes in those fields served by a shared SDC. In addition, the availability of publicly accessible data stores opens new possibilities to re-use data to investigate research questions beyond the original purposes for which the data were generated. However, problems related to the long-term management and preservation, or curation, of data collections are complex. Durable solutions and best practices are not as yet definite, and while many data collections have the potential for wide scientific purpose or public appeal, there is as yet no framework for predicting which collections will be of most value to maintain for the long-term.Of particular interest are community-based, "Resource Collections" identified by the National Science Board (2005) in the Long-Lived Digital Data Collections report. At present, we have very little understanding of how they develop or the ways that they are used. It is anticipated that these collections will need consistent participation from domain scientists and data managers over the course of the data lifecycle, as curation activities will be integrally connected to the daily activities of research production. A scientific data collection from the neurosciences was selected as a case to analyze the features and characteristics of Resource Collections, and their significance for ongoing curation and stewardship in academic libraries.Based on this research, it is evident that Resource Collections can have features beyond those described in the NSB report, with potential for considerable variation across this level of collection. Analysis also shows that shared scientific data collections create an intersection of scientific production and scholarly communication, where they perform multiple roles, including data management, data sharing space for collaborative work, and data publishing functions like registration and certification. While it was anticipated that biologists would represent the most frequent collection users, end-use was predominantly by tool developers, informaticists and computational scientists, which has implications for both dissemination and curation activities. Finally, as shared data collections are emerging as an integral and significant part of the scientific record, collection lifecycle stages are proposed and related to their curation and stewardship.LimitedRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD