Étiquette : data repositories

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Building a Trustworthy Data Repository: CoreTrustSeal Certification as a Lens for Service Improvements

Authors : Cara Key, Clara Llebot, Michael Boock

Objective

The university library aims to provide university researchers with a trustworthy institutional repository for sharing data. The library sought CoreTrustSeal certification in order to measure the quality of data services in the institutional repository, and to promote researchers’ confidence when depositing their work.

Methods

The authors served on a small team of library staff who collaborated to compose the certification application. They describe the self-assessment process, as they iterated through cycles of compiling information and responding to reviewer feedback.

Results

The application team gained understanding of data repository best practices, shared knowledge about the institutional repository, and identified areas of service improvements necessary to meet certification requirements. Based on the application and feedback, the team took measures to enhance preservation strategies, governance, and public-facing policies and documentation for the repository.

Conclusions

The university library gained a better understanding of top-notch data services and measurably improved these services by pursuing and obtaining CoreTrustSeal certification.

URL : Building a Trustworthy Data Repository: CoreTrustSeal Certification as a Lens for Service Improvements

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.761

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EN

More than data repositories: perceived information needs for the development of social sciences and humanities research infrastructures

Authors : Anna Sendra, Elina Late, Sanna Kumpulainen

Introduction

The digitalization of social sciences and humanities research necessitates research infrastructures. However, this transformation is still incipient, highlighting the need to better understand how to successfully support data-intensive research.

Method

Starting from a case study of building a national infrastructure for conducting data-intensive research, this study aims to understand the information needs of digital researchers regarding the facility and explore the importance of evaluation in its development.

Analysis

Thirteen semi-structured interviews with social sciences and humanities scholars and computer and data scientists processed through a thematic analysis revealed three themes (developing a research infrastructure, needs and expectations of the research infrastructure, and an approach to user feedback and user interactions).

Results

Findings reveal that developing an infrastructure for conducting data-intensive research is a complicated task influenced by contrasting information needs between social sciences and humanities scholars and computer and data scientists, such as the demand for increased support of the former. Findings also highlight the limited role of evaluation in its creation.

Conclusions

The development of infrastructures for conducting data-intensive research requires further discussion that particularly considers the disciplinary differences between social sciences and humanities scholars and computer and data scientists. Suggestions on how to better design this kind of facilities are also raised.

URL : More than data repositories: perceived information needs for the development of social sciences and humanities research infrastructures

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47989/ir284598

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EN

Data Quality Assurance at Research Data Repositories

Authors : Maxi Kindling, Dorothea Strecker

This paper presents findings from a survey on the status quo of data quality assurance practices at research data repositories. The personalised online survey was conducted among repositories indexed in re3data in 2021. It covered the scope of the repository, types of data quality assessment, quality criteria, responsibilities, details of the review process, and data quality information and yielded 332 complete responses.

The results demonstrate that most repositories perform data quality assurance measures, and overall, research data repositories significantly contribute to data quality. Quality assurance at research data repositories is multifaceted and nonlinear, and although there are some common patterns, individual approaches to ensuring data quality are diverse.

The survey showed that data quality assurance sets high expectations for repositories and requires a lot of resources. Several challenges were discovered: for example, the adequate recognition of the contribution of data reviewers and repositories, the path dependence of data review on review processes for text publications, and the lack of data quality information. The study could not confirm that the certification status of a repository is a clear indicator of whether a repository conducts in-depth quality assurance.

URL : Data Quality Assurance at Research Data Repositories

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-018

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EN

The financial maintenance of social science data archives: Four case studies of long-term infrastructure work

Authors : Kristin R. Eschenfelder, Kalpana Shankar, Greg Downey

Contributing to the literature on knowledge infrastructure maintenance, this article describes a historical longitudinal analysis of revenue streams employed by four social science data organizations: the Roper Center for Public Opinion, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the UK Data Archive (UKDA), and the LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg (LIS).

Drawing on archival documentation and interviews, we describe founders’ assumptions about revenue, changes to revenue streams over the long term, practices for developing and maintaining revenue streams, the importance of financial support from host organizations, and how the context of each data organization shaped revenue possibilities.

We extend conversations about knowledge infrastructure revenue streams by showing the types of change that have occurred over time and how it occurs. We provide examples of the types of flexibility needed for data organizations to remain sustainable over 40–60 years of revenue changes.

We distinguish between Type A flexibilities, or development of new products and services, and Type B flexibilities, or continuous smaller adjustments to existing revenue streams. We argue that Type B flexibilities are as important as Type A, although they are easily overlooked. Our results are relevant to knowledge infrastructure managers and stakeholders facing similar revenue challenges.

URL : The financial maintenance of social science data archives: Four case studies of long-term infrastructure work

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24691

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EN

Research data management and services: Resources for different data practitioners

Author : Gilbert Mushi

The emergence of data-driven research and demands for the establishment of Research Data Management (RDM) has created interest in academic institutions and research organizations globally.

Some of the libraries especially in developed countries have started offering RDM services to their communities. Although lagging behind, some academic libraries in developing countries are at the stage of planning or implementing the service. However, the level of RDM awareness is very low among researchers, librarians and other data practitioners.

The objective of this paper is to present available open resources for different data practitioners particularly researchers and librarians.

It includes training resources for both researchers and librarians, Data Management Plan (DMP) tool for researchers; data repositories available for researchers to freely archive and share their research data to the local and international communities.

A case study with a survey was conducted at the University of Dodoma to identify relevant RDM services so that librarians could assist researchers to make their data accessible to the local and international community.

The study findings revealed a low level of RDM awareness among researchers and librarians. Over 50% of the respondent indicated their perceived knowledge as poor in the following RDM knowledge areas; DMP, data repository, long term digital preservation, funders RDM mandates, metadata standards describing data and general awareness of RDM.

Therefore, this paper presents available open resources for different data practitioners to improve RDM knowledge and boost the confidence of academic and research libraries in establishing the service.

URL : Research data management and services: Resources for different data practitioners

DOI : https://doi.org/10.29173/iq995

Catégories
EN

Open research data repositories: Practices, norms, and metadata for sharing images

Authors : Karin Hansson, Anna Dahlgren

Open research data repositories are promoted as one of the cornerstones in the open research paradigm, promoting collaboration, interoperability, and large-scale sharing and reuse. There is, however, a lack of research investigating what these sharing platforms actually share and a more critical interface analysis of the norms and practices embedded in this datafication of academic practice is needed.

This article takes image data sharing in the humanities as a case study for investigating the possibilities and constraints in 5 open research data repositories. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the interface along with the technical means for metadata, the study shows how the platforms are differentiated in terms of signifiers of research paradigms, but that beneath the rhetoric of the interface, they are designed in a similar way, which does not correspond well with the image researchers’ need for detailed metadata.

Combined with the problem of copyright limitations, these data-sharing tools are simply not sophisticated enough when it comes to sharing and reusing images. The result also corresponds with previous research showing that these tools are used not so much for sharing research data, but more for promoting researcher personas.

URL : Open research data repositories: Practices, norms, and metadata for sharing images

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24571

Catégories
EN

Institutional Data Repository Development, a Moving Target

Authors : Colleen Fallaw, Genevieve Schmitt, Hoa Luong, Jason Colwell, Jason Strutz

At the end of 2019, the Research Data Service (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) completed its fifth year as a campus-wide service. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the RDS in meeting the needs of Illinois researchers, RDS staff developed a five-year review consisting of a survey and a series of in-depth focus group interviews.

As a result, our institutional data repository developed in-house by University Library IT staff, Illinois Data Bank, was recognized as the most useful service offering by our unit. When launched in 2016, storage resources and web servers for Illinois Data Bank and supporting systems were hosted on-premises at UIUC.

As anticipated, researchers increasingly need to share large, and complex datasets. In a responsive effort to leverage the potentially more reliable, highly available, cost-effective, and scalable storage accessible to computation resources, we migrated our item bitstreams and web services to the cloud. Our efforts have met with success, but also with painful bumps along the way.

This article describes how we supported data curation workflows through transitioning from on-premises to cloud resource hosting. It details our approaches to ingesting, curating, and offering access to dataset files up to 2TB in size–which may be archive type files (e.g., .zip or .tar) containing complex directory structures.

URL : https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15821