Zheng (John) Wang
Associate University Librarian, Digital Access, Resources and Information Technology
University of Notre Dame
Rick Johnson
Co-Director, Digital Initiatives and Scholarship
University of Notre Dame
Deborah Ludwig
Assistant Dean, Innovation and Strategy
University of Kansas
Ann Campion Riley
Associate Director of Libraries, Access, Collections, and Technical Services
University of Missouri, Columbia
Jump Start Research Data Curation and Support (Wang, Johnson)
This session provides Notre Dame’s experience as a case study to provision research data curation and access services. Managing research outputs becomes a tall order of many universities, given their determined agenda to pursue research excellence. In a world of increasingly data-intensive research, data are rising as a critical component of scholarly communication, often mandated by granting agencies. Data curation, preservation, and access are paramount to the university academic mission, and academic and research libraries are some of the few entities of the universities that carry out such functions; however, libraries’ enduring commitments in print and current operations, and complex campus organizations, often hinder their ability to quickly respond to the data needs of the academy. Notre Dame’s investment in research was recently reinforced by the University’s approval of the expansion of 10 disciplines, such as computational data, adult stem cell research, and nuclear physics. There is a great need for support for research data on campus. The Hesburgh Libraries has been building an institutional digital repository since winter 2012. To respond to the emerging trends, in June 2013 the Libraries switched to a user-centered, agile approach to develop data curation and access services. The goal remains to accept all scholarly outputs (text, images, video and audio), but with an imminent emphasis on research support, and the strategy is to grow, simultaneously, data curation services and the user base, and to build success stories to drive adoptions along the way. Early adopters were identified with the help of subject librarians, and they determined the most critical baseline features for the Libraries to develop. Hydra open source solutions were also leveraged, and Notre Dame collaborated with Northwestern University, Indiana University, and the University of Virginia to create a new community shared Institutional Repository (IR) system. Early adopters have been piloting features since summer 2013, and a full rollout is planned by April 2014. This session will include the project’s development philosophy to overcome resource shortages to meet high demands on research support, the strategy to reach and develop a user base and roadmap, insights on faculty’s needs for research support, the methodology to leverage and contribute to open source tools, and a quick demo of the curation tool.
Presentation (Wang)
Data Federation of University Research (Ludwig, Riley)
D4 (Data Federation Of University Research) is a partnership of research universities developing a plan to federate institutional approaches to research data management and accompanying services at scale which is funded through a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and led by the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), the Great Plains Network (GPN), and the University of Kansas (KU). In its first year of operation, focus was on creating an overarching plan from an environmental scan and on working with a broad array of chief information officers, chief research officers and university librarians that make up the advisory council for the project. Now in its second year, committees are working to flesh out plans in two areas: 1) capacity for data sharing, storage, archiving and preservation, and 2) education, training and outreach. An infrastructure is envisioned that is interoperable and able to maximize the existing efforts of member institutions with potential connection to the emerging network of repositories envisioned in the Association for Research Libraries/Association of American Universities/Association of Public and Land-grant Universities SHARE proposal. The plans include a suite of services to address readiness, training, and policy needs on participating campuses. The D4 steering committee includes representation from the University of Missouri, the University of Arkansas and Arkansas High Performance Computing Center, the University of Tulsa, the executive director of the Greater Western Library Alliance, the director for cyberinfrastructure for the Great Plains Network, and the KU Libraries and Information Technology divisions.
https://curate.library.nd.edu/
http://imls.gwla.org
Presentation (Ludwig)