CIRSS

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Data sharing, small science, and institutional repositories. UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, December 7-9, 2009, Oxford, UK. First author: Melissa H. Cragin; co-authors: Marina Kogan, Jacob R. Carlson, Michael Witt.

Melissa Cragin will be presenting Data sharing: small science, and institutional repositories on Wednesday, December 9^th, 2009 at the meeting.

The All-Hands Meeting has become the annual event where computational scientists and technologists can come together to share, discuss and advance the exciting research that has grown out of the e-Science Programme.

Traditionally a September event,  the AHM has moved to December to coexist with the IEEE e-Science meeting, giving us the opportunity to bring the UK community together with the international leaders in e-Science.

We are happy to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services Digital Collections and Content project has joined Flickr! Our first set of photographs  from Flora (IL) Public Librarys Charles Overstreet Collection  has been uploaded to the photosharing portal as part of the Flickr Feasibility Study (pdf), an IMLS DCC initiative that began this summer with the goal of increasing the availability and exposure of rare, historical photos in the IMLS-funded collections that we have aggregated. We will continue with regular uploads of photographs from a variety of collections, so keep checking our photostream; we welcome tags and comments.

The Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive approximately $2.9 million dollars as a partner on the Data Conservancy project, a $20 million initiative led by the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries. The five-year award, one of the first two in the NSF's DataNet program, will build
infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital research data. The principal investigator is Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, and associate dean of university libraries, at Johns Hopkins. The sub-award to the University of Illinois is led by co-principal investigator, Carole L. Palmer, director of CIRSS and professor at GSLIS. Other CIRSS researchers include Melissa Cragin, Allen Renear, John MacMullen, and David Dubin from GSLIS, and Michael Welge from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The project will begin with data from astronomy, the life sciences, earth sciences, and social sciences, developing a framework to more fully understand data practices currently in use, and arrive at a model for curation that allows ease of access both within and across disciplines. "Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and data-intensive," said Choudhury, "which means that new management structures and technologies will be critical to accommodate the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and streams. The potential for the sharing and application of data across disciplines is incredible. But it's not enough to simply discover data; you need to be able to access it and be assured it will remain available."

The Illinois team will contribute to multiple aspects of the project, conducting studies of scientists' data practices and needs, and analyzing how best to represent complex units of data in the repository. "We will be conducting a systematic analysis of the data curation requirements across the disciplines served by the Data Conservancy," said Palmer. "Our primary interest is in the 'long tail of small science,' and how to support collecting and sharing of the highly variable types of data produced by individual scientists and small research groups. Our results will determine data curation and preservation requirements but also policies to guide how the Data Conservancy and other large, cross-disciplinary data repositories are developed and used." The research led by Renear will develop formal terminology and identity conditions for fundamental data concepts. "Many of the key cross-cutting concepts of scientific data organization remain poorly defined," said Renear. "Our work will provide the foundation for standardizing how Data Conservancy datasets are identified, described, related, and organized."

The CIRSS research activities and other Data Conservancy efforts will feed directly into two professional training programs at GSLIS, the Data Curation specialization in the master's of library and information science and the Biological Information Specialists master's in the campus-wide bioinformatics program. The award will also support professional development in data curation principles, processes, and technologies.

Allen Renear, GSLIS Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research, will be presenting Strategic reading and scientific discourse at the Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse. 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), October 25-29, Washington, DC.