Geoff Harder
Associate University Librarian
University of Alberta
Leanne Trimble
Data and Geospatial Librarian
Scholars Portal
Dugan O’Neil
Chief Science Officer
Compute Canada
Brian Owen
Associate University Librarian
Simon Fraser University
Martha Whitehead
Vice-Provost and University Librarian
Queen’s University
In recent years, research data management services have been emerging in academic libraries across Canada, but with uneven availability and fledgling infrastructure. In 2014, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) launched a project to develop a national research data management network that would be a collaborative undertaking by academic libraries and national cyberinfrastructure providers. This initiative, now named Portage, looked at leveraging existing open source tools and local/regional initiatives already underway with a view to scaling them to the national level. During the pilot year the groundwork was laid for a preservation and discovery network that addresses the full lifecycle for research data. It has demonstrated it is feasible to connect commonly used data management systems and virtual research environments such as Dataverse and Islandora with digital preservation systems such as Archivematica, and deposit the resulting archival information packets on storage systems such as the Ontario Library Research Cloud and the national high performance computing network provided by Compute Canada. With support from Research Data Canada and CANARIE, the Portage team and Compute Canada worked together to build this model. Compute Canada also tested a new data publication service offered by Globus, a service that already supports high-speed data replication across Compute Canada nodes. In this session, three different data workflows will be discussed: Islandora-Archivematica, Dataverse-Archivematica and Globus. Other key elements of Portage will also be outlined, including the development of a network of expertise that will provide free access to research data management tools and resources and manage the Portage Data Management Plan Builder.