The Role of Libraries in Data Curation

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The Role of Libraries in Data Curation

Or How do we even get started?
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looping slides
John MacColl European Director, RLG
Partnership 9 June 2010
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What I want to talk about

• The importance of data
• Institutional vs domain solutions
• Skills needs
• Our project
• Reward structures

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The importance of data
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Its the data, stupid

• astronomers are just as likely to point a
  software query tool at a digital sky survey as to
  point a telescope at the stars (The Economist,
  Feb 2010)
• It's like the invention of the telescope,"
  Franco Moretti, a Stanford professor of English
  and comparative literature, says of Google Books.
  "All of a sudden, an enormous amount of matter
  becomes visible. (The Chronicle, The humanities
  go Google, May 28 2010)

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DataVerse (Gary King, 2007)

• Data sometimes exist on individual researchers
  Web sites, without professional backups, off-site
  replication, plans for format conversion and
  migration, or professional cataloging.

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Pious hopes (Carole Palmer)

• 60 archive generated or collected data (no
  offsite backup)
• 61 expect to keep more than 10 years

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Data lost, and data never born (U Wisconsin
Summary Report of the Research Data Management
Study Group (2009))

• In some cases, inadequate storage capacity is
  leading to loss of data forcing some researchers
  to discard data from past experiments in order to
  make room for current ones or to avoid certain
  types of experiments and research altogether

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Data and their uses
Freely available
Locked away
Embargoed
Shared with collaborators
Secondary artifacts statistical and pattern
analyses subset extractions visualisations
simulations discovery environments
transformations
Primary data sensory, numeric, digitised,
geospatial, etc
Ancillary data questionnaires, fieldnotes, lab
notebooks, data dictionaries, annotations,
lecture notes, etc
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Dont try this at home?
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Institutional vs domain solutions
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Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital
Preservation and Access on aggregation

• Creating economies of scale among archives when
  possible is always desirable, and may be critical
  when the materials under stewardship require
  particular kinds of expertise that are scarce.
  This is the case for much scientific data.

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Qualified gravitational pull (Green and Gutmann)

• Most institutional repositories do not and
  cannot offer support for managing dataset formats
  over time Policies for long-term stewardship
  vary among institutions, but many have developed
  a sliding scale of preservation promises

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Oxford University Research data management
services findings of the consultation with
service providers (September 2008)
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Cornell DataStaR a staging repository
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Datasets in Cornell IR
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Monash approach (institutional) (Treloar)
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U Wisconsin proposal

• Solutions comprised solely of expensive
  technology will fail, because of the underlying
  need to establish long-lasting cultural stability
  within and between the research, library, and IT
  communities on campus.

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Curation responsibilities (Carlson, The
Chronicle, 2006)
Data from Big Science is easier to handle,
understand and archive. Small Science is
horribly heterogeneous and far more vast. In time
Small Science will generate 2-3 times more data
than Big Science.
big science data
domain?
institution?
small science data
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Experiments failures

• NSF DataNet Data Conservancy project. 20m
  awarded. Led by JHU. Includes social sciences.
• U. Va. Mellon grant 870k. Programmers and
  archivists. Includes Stanford, Yale and Hull. To
  create a model for digital collection management
  that can be easily shared among research
  libraries.
• UKRDS ?

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Meanwhile
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Specialist data archives
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Skills needs
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Is this possible (Gabridge)?

• libraries can develop existing liaisons with
  interest, passion, and strong analytical skills
  or they can recruit domain experts, and teach
  them about excellent information science
  practices.

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ARL study Scott Brandt
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Our project
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Joint OCLC Research-LIBER

• Binghamton
• Brigham Young
• Cambridge
• Leeds
• Melbourne
• Nijmegen
• Oxford

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Deliverables

• Desk research
• Case studies
• Interviews with researchers
• Report and recommendations

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Project Aim

• It has been frequently asserted in the
  literature on data curation that there are new
  service roles for research libraries emerging.
  This project will seek to test this hypothesis by
  considering the data curation requirements of a
  number of recently completed research projects in
  a sample group of North American and European
  universities

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Method

• Each university partner will produce two or
  three case studies of projects in which data has
  been generated, and consider the data curation
  implications of these The project will conclude
  with an assessment of the potential role of the
  research library in general in relation to such
  datasets, based on the examples of good practice
  discovered via the case studies.

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Project Approach

• The proposed project will adopt a bottom-up
  approach and be grounded in the realities of data
  storage and preservation behaviour as exemplified
  in a number of real instances

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Scale again

• We consider that the question of how to arrive
  at an articulation between the institutional
  library and domain or funder data archives is one
  of the most urgent requirements in this area, and
  the project will explore it carefully.

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Environments data
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Timescapes (Leeds)
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Nyman/Jones Archive (Leeds)
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The Australian Womens Register (Melbourne)
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Life Patterns (Melbourne)
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Incremental Project (Cambridge)
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What do we expect?

• Not a great deal!
• Need to adjust our timescales?
• Signs of progress?
• Indications of favourable organisational
  frameworks?
• Indications of favourable policies?
• A taking of stock

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Reward structures
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Days understatement
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Being excited about being cited (DataVerse, King)

• Articles with accessible data are cited twice
  as often as otherwise equivalent articles that do
  not provide data access.
• Articles in journals with replication policies
  that make data available are cited thrice as
  frequently as otherwise equivalent articles
  without accessible data

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Library neutrality (Steinhart, 2007)?

• There is ample evidence that even when
  appropriate data repositories exist for a
  particular discipline, researchers often fail to
  take full advantage of them This lack of
  participation in data sharing and archival
  activities suggests an opportunity for academic
  libraries to provide a much-needed service

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Thinning the library

• No longer just about capture of outputs at the
  endpoint
• The library has to be involved in the whole
  process of research and scholarship, throughout
  its lifecycle
• This involves thinning out the library
• Rethinking the point of engagement
• The library becomes engineering
• and people

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Ten Questions to Begin a Conversation With Your
Faculty About Data Curation (Witt Carlson)

1. What is the story of your data?
2. What form and format are the data in?
3. What is the expected lifespan of your data?
4. How could your data be used, reused, and
   repurposed?
5. How large is your dataset, and what is its rate
   of growth?
6. Who are potential audiences for your data?
7. Who owns the data?
8. Does the dataset include any sensitive
   information?
9. What publications or discoveries have resulted
   from the data?
10. How should the data be made accessible?

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Repositories at present are the wrong model
(Green and Guttman)

• repositories position themselves at or near the
  end of the scientific research life cycle. Their
  goal is less to partner with researchers or with
  domain-specific repositories throughout the
  research life cycle than to garner the value of
  the institutions productivity

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Appraisal (Cornell)

• The archivist can no longer wait passively at
  the end of the life cycle for records to arrive
  at the archives when their creators no longer
  wanted them or were dead (Cook 2000).

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Discussion!

• John MacColl

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Next up

• Lunch and then
• 100
• Framing Libraries and the Environment
• Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Research
• Buckingham