Closing plenary @ #cni15s by Carole Palmer of @UW_iSchool, Realizing the Potential of Research Data

Realizing the Potential of Research Data

Carole L. Palmer
Professor
Associate Dean for Research
Information School
University of Washington

Efforts to harness and exploit digital research data have proliferated at a dizzying pace. We have an abundance of reports by federal agencies on data, cyberinfrastructure, and e-science, and are experiencing rampant growth in data repositories and archives. New professional groups and meetings regularly emerge and overlap, while some formal academic programs and continuing education options for data professionals become established. Informatics is becoming a familiar mode of inquiry in nearly all fields of study. As the discourse on big data and data science continues to get wider and louder, expectations for data sharing and cross-disciplinary access and use intensify. Yet, our base of fundamental knowledge on data is, at best, nascent and scattered. To achieve the envisioned potential of science with data, we need to invest in the science of data. Drawing on my experience with several research and education initiatives in data curation, I will discuss factors that make data valuable and sharable within and across research cultures, and the changing demands for data curation expertise and responsibility in research libraries, data centers, universities, and the corporate sector. With data as the object of study and focus of education, we can move toward coherent centers of excellence in data resources and services and gain a better return on our investment in the promise of abundant data.

"Building a Vast Library of Life" @BioDivLibrary presentation at #CNI15S in Seattle with Nancy E. Gwinn

Building a Vast Library of Life: The Biodiversity Heritage Library Looks to the Future. Nancy E. Gwinn & Martin R. Kalfatovic. CNI Spring 2015 Meeting. Seattle, 13 April 2015.

Building a Vast Library of Life: The Biodiversity Heritage Library Looks to the Future from Martin Kalfatovic

As the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an international consortium of natural history museums, botanical gardens, agricultural, university, biological research libraries, and like organizations and institutions (“BHL Member Institutions”) whose purpose which improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. As the BHL approaches its 10th anniversary, it has transformed its partner organizations, built a robust technology infrastructure and community, and developed an organizational framework for sustainability. This session will provide a brief look back on the past of BHL and focus on key strategies and challenges as BHL looks towards its second decade in a dramatically changed networked environment.

Getting ready for @Biodivlibrary presentation at #cni15s

Challenges Presented By Institutional Identifiers by @karens_y

Karen Smith-Yoshimura
Program Officer
OCLC Research
Institutions wish to enhance and promote their reputation to attract funders and faculty and to increase their ranking. Since universities change their official names as part of branding activities, academic departments change their names to reflect new curricular emphasis, and schools merge with or separate from parent institutions, institutional identifiers are crucial to accurately represent scholars' affiliations both on their output and on grant applications. Institutions may not realize they already have such an institutional identifier, ISNI, and that this identifier has already been disseminated, used by ORCID and included in VIAF and Wikidata. This project briefing summarizes the current work of an OCLC Research task force on use cases and challenges of representing organizations in the ISNI database.
http://www.isni.org/content/oclc-research-partners-task-force-representing-organizations-isni

Presentation on @SILibraries Smithsonian Research Online at #CNI15S in Seattle

For the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: The Smithsonian's Research Online (SRO), Supporting Smithsonian Institution’s Plan to Provide Increased Public Access to Federally Funded Publications and Digital Research Materials. Martin R. Kalfatovic. CNI Spring 2015 Meeting. Seattle, 13 April 2015.

Thanks to Alvin Hutchinson, Richard Naples, and all Smithsonian Libraries' staff who help make the SRO a success.

For the Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: The Smithsonian's Research Online (SRO), Supporting Smithsonian Institution’s Plan to Provide Increased Public Access to Federally Funded Publications and Digital Research Materials from Martin Kalfatovic

Smithsonian Research Online (SRO) is a key tool in the Smithsonian's goal to implement the White House's "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research" mandate. A pan-Smithsonian team developed the Smithsonian Institution plan and draft Implementation Manual that will meet the requirement laid out in by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The existing SRO platform (and associated digital repository) will serve as key components of the Smithsonian's plan which will also user additional tools and resources being developed by the wider ARL and publishers' community. The Smithsonian OSTP Plan was a cooperative response developed by Smithsonian Libraries, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, Smithsonian researchers, the Office of General Counsel, and the Office of the Chief Information Officer, under the guidance of the Smithsonian's Deputy Under Secretary for Collections and Interdisciplinary Support. This session will outline the interactions of the various portions of the draft plan and its manifestation in a non-university environment.

Social Networks & Archival Context: From R&D To Cooperative Program / Pitti & @Tingletech #cni15s

Daniel Pitti
Associate Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
University of Virginia
Brian Tingle
Technical Lead, Access & Publishing, California Digital Library
University of California

Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC [2010- ]), currently a research project, is in the early stages of being transformed into an international archival description cooperative hosted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The long-term technological objective for the Cooperative is a platform that will support a continuously expanding, curated corpus of reliable biographical descriptions of people linked to and providing contextual understanding of the historical records that function as primary evidence for understanding their lives and work. In the research phase, SNAC has demonstrated that the descriptions of people embedded in archival descriptions of historical records can be extracted and assembled into a social-document network. This network provides the foundation for a History Research Tool that provides integrated access to dispersed historical resources as well as the social and historical context for understanding and interpreting the resources. The Cooperative will be responsible for the ongoing expansion and curation of the assembled SNAC social-document data and the ongoing development of the History Research Tool.

Stewarding the Scholarly Record at the U of AZ / @Librarywiz , M Oxnan, & K Chapman

Maliaca Oxnam
Associate Librarian, Vitae Project Manager, Libraries
University of Arizona
Kimberly Chapman
Director, Campus Repository Services
University of Arizona
Jeremy Frumkin
Assistant Dean for Technology Strategy
University of Arizona

The University of Arizona (UA) Libraries has an evolving strategy to steward the scholarly record of the institution. As a key component of this strategy the Libraries have a leadership role in implementing UA Vitae, a mandated online faculty activity reporting system with initial focus on supporting the faculty evaluation process. In partnership with the Office of the Provost and Campus Computing, the Libraries contribute expertise in support of this campus initiative. Leveraging the data from this effort to capture a more holistic view of the scholarly record provides opportunities for the Libraries to partner on approaches to utilizing, stewarding, and exposing the scholarly record. This presentation will describe the University and the Library's evolving strategies in regard to defining and stewarding the scholarly record, our experiences with the build-out of the faculty activity reporting system, and next steps in bringing together information and systems that are transforming our University.
http://uavitae.arizona.edu

Introducing @Brewster_Kahle at #CNI15s

Giant Cliff, #CNI15s edition