Preserving Research Data
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Session Moderator: Gail Steinhart, Environmental Sciences and GIS Librarian, Cornell University Library.
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Item Preserving Things that Count: Exploring partnerships among domain specific repositories, institutional repositories, and social science researchersGreen, Ann; Gutmann, Myron (2006-10-27T17:39:25Z)In developing and debating digital repositories, the digital library world has devoted more attention to their missions and roles in supporting access to and stewardship of academic research output than to discussing discipline, or domain, specific digital repositories. This is especially interesting, given that in social science these domain-specific repositories have been in existence for many decades. The goal of this presentation is to juxtapose these two kinds of repositories and to suggest ways that they can help build partnerships between themselves and with the research community. It is based on the fundamental idea that all the parties involved share important goals, and that by working together these goals can be advanced successfully. We will begin by characterizing the life cycle of social science research, before turning to key elements of the two different kinds of repositories, and then to our recommendation that researchers and the two different kinds of repositories can forge partnerships. The key message is that by visualizing the role of repositories explicitly in the life cycle of the social science research enterprise, the ways that the partnerships work will be clear. These workings can be seen as a sequence of reciprocal information flows between parties to the process, triggers that signal that one party or another has a task to perform, and hand-offs of information from one party to another that take place at crucial moments. This approach envisions both cooperation and specialization. The researcher produces the scientific product, both data and publications; the institutional repository has specialized knowledge of campus conditions and the opportunity to interact frequently with the researcher; and the domain-specific repository has specialized knowledge of approaches to data in a specific scientific field, for example domain-specific metadata standards, as well as the ability to give high-impact exposure to research products.Item Digital Data Preservation and Curation: A Collaboration Among Libraries, Publishers, and the Virtual ObservatoryHanisch, Robert; Steffen, Julie; Choudhury, Sayeed; DiLauro, Tim; Szalay, Alex; Vishniac, Ethan; Milkey, Robert; Plante, Ray (2006-10-27T17:35:59Z)Digital Data Preservation and Curation: A Collaboration Among Libraries, Publishers, and the Virtual Observatory. Astronomers are producing and analyzing data at ever more prodigious rates. NASA's Great Observatories, ground-based national observatories, and major survey projects have archive and data distribution systems in place to manage their standard data products, and these are now interlinked through the protocols and metadata standards agreed upon in the Virtual Observatory. However, the digital data associated with peer-reviewed publications is only rarely archived. Most often, astronomers publish graphical representations of their data but not the data themselves. Other astronomers cannot readily inspect the data to either confirm the interpretation presented in a paper or extend the analysis. Highly processed data sets reside on departmental servers and the personal computers of astronomers, and may or may not be available a few years hence. We are investigating ways to preserve and curate the digital data associated with peer-reviewed journals in astronomy. The technology and standards of the VO provide one component of the necessary technology. A variety of underlying systems can be used to physically host a data repository, and indeed this repository need not be centralized. The repository, however, must be managed and data must be documented through high quality, curated metadata. Multiple access portals must be available: the original journal, the host data center, the Virtual Observatory, or any number of topically-oriented data services utilizing VO-standard access mechanisms.Item nestor II: e-Science and Preservation--A Perfect Match?Neuroth, Heike (2006-10-27T17:31:20Z)e-Science and Preservation - A Perfect Match: The hard sciences have worked for many years towards global collaboration on an infrastructural and workflow level. The concepts and technologies eveloped in this venture are increasingly being adopted by other disciplines including the social sciences or the arts and humanities. In Europe these disciplines aim to establish an integrated e-Science landscape to benefit from the existing resources and experiences attained by the "hard sciences". Current humanities projects under the e-Science umbrella are on a promising route. The preservation community could benefit greatly from the e-science community in the strive for - amongst other - sharing storage resources while maintaining local autonomy; interoperability and resource integration on a semantic level; adaptability for long-term stability; sharing services and synchronising workflows. As part of its mission as a national coalition for digital preservation, Nestor II aims to network the e-Science and preservation communities and further the transfer of concepts and tools between them.