Category: Digital Curation & Digital Preservation

"Talking Datasets: Understanding Data Sensemaking Behaviours"

Laura Koesten et al. have self-archived "Talking Datasets: Understanding Data Sensemaking Behaviours."

Here's an excerpt:

The sharing and reuse of data are seen as critical to solving the most complex problems of today. Despite this potential, relatively little is known about a key step in data reuse: people's behaviours involved in data-centric sensemaking. We aim to address this gap by presenting a mixed-methods study combining in-depth interviews, a think-aloud task and a screen recording analysis with 31 researchers as they summarised and interacted with both familiar and unfamiliar data. We use our findings to identify and detail common activity patterns and necessary data attributes across three clusters of sensemaking activities: inspecting data, engaging with content, and placing data within broader contexts. We conclude by proposing design recommendations for tools and documentation practices which can be used to facilitate sensemaking and subsequent data reuse.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"FAIR Principles: Interpretations and Implementation Considerations"

Annika Jacobsen, et al. have published "FAIR Principles: Interpretations and Implementation Considerations" in Data Intelligence.

Here's an excerpt:

The FAIR principles have been widely cited, endorsed and adopted by a broad range of stakeholders since their publication in 2016. By intention, the 15 FAIR guiding principles do not dictate specific technological implementations, but provide guidance for improving Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of digital resources. This has likely contributed to the broad adoption of the FAIR principles, because individual stakeholder communities can implement their own FAIR solutions. However, it has also resulted in inconsistent interpretations that carry the risk of leading to incompatible implementations. Thus, while the FAIR principles are formulated on a high level and may be interpreted and implemented in different ways, for true interoperability we need to support convergence in implementation choices that are widely accessible and (re)-usable. We introduce the concept of FAIR implementation considerations to assist accelerated global participation and convergence towards accessible, robust, widespread and consistent FAIR implementations. Any self-identified stakeholder community may either choose to reuse solutions from existing implementations, or when they spot a gap, accept the challenge to create the needed solution, which, ideally, can be used again by other communities in the future. Here, we provide interpretations and implementation considerations (choices and challenges) for each FAIR principle.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Cracking the Copyright Dilemma in Software Preservation: Protecting Digital Culture through Fair Use Consensus"

Brandon Butler et al. have published "Cracking the Copyright Dilemma in Software Preservation: Protecting Digital Culture through Fair Use Consensus" in The Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Copyright problems may inhibit the crucially important work of preserving legacy software. Such software is worthy of study in its own right because it is critical to accessing digital culture and expression. Preservation work is essential for communicating across boundaries of the past and present in a digital era. Software preservationists in the United States have addressed their copyright problems by developing a code of best practices in employing fair use. Their work is an example of how collective action by users of law changes the norms and beliefs about law, which can in turn change the law itself insofar as the law takes account of community norms and practices. The work of creating the code involved facilitators who are communication, information sciences, and legal scholars and practitioners. Thus, the creation of the code is also an example of crossing the boundaries between technology and policy research.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"The History and Future of Data Citation in Practice"

Mark A. Parsons et al. have published "The History and Future of Data Citation in Practice" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In this review, we adopt the definition that 'Data citation is a reference to data for the purpose of credit attribution and facilitation of access to the data' (TGDCSP 2013: CIDCR6). Furthermore, access should be enabled for both humans and machines (DCSG 2014). We use this to discuss how data citation has evolved over the last couple of decades and to highlight issues that need more research and attention.

Data citation is not a new concept, but it has changed and evolved considerably since the beginning of the digital age. Basic practice is now established and slowly but increasingly being implemented. Nonetheless, critical issues remain. These issues are primarily because we try to address multiple human and computational concerns with a system originally designed in a non-digital world for more limited use cases. The community is beginning to challenge past assumptions, separate the multiple concerns (credit, access, reference, provenance, impact, etc.), and apply different approaches for different use cases.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Practice Meets Principle: Tracking Software and Data Citations to Zenodo DOIs"

Stephanie van de Sandt et al. have self-archived "Practice Meets Principle: Tracking Software and Data Citations to Zenodo DOIs."

Here's an excerpt:

Data and software citations are crucial for the transparency of research results and for the transmission of credit. But they are hard to track, because of the absence of a common citation standard. As a consequence, the FORCE11 recently proposed data and software citation principles as guidance for authors. Zenodo is recognized for the implementation of DOIs for software on a large scale. The minting of complementary DOIs for the version and concept allows measuring the impact of dynamic software. This article investigates characteristics of 5,456 citations to Zenodo data and software that were captured by the Asclepias Broker in January 2019. We analyzed the current state of data and software citation practices and the quality of software citation recommendations with regard to the impact of recent standardization efforts. Our findings prove that current citation practices and recommendations do not match proposed citation standards. We consequently suggest practical first steps towards the implementation of the software citation principles.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions"

Elias Oltmanns et al. have published "Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Ensuring the long-term availability of research data forms an integral part of data management services. Where OAIS compliant digital preservation has been established in recent years, in almost all cases the services aim at the preservation of file-based objects. In the Digital Humanities, research data is often represented in highly structured aggregations, such as Scholarly Digital Editions. Naturally, scholars would like their editions to remain functionally complete as long as possible. Besides standard components like webservers, the presentation typically relies on project specific code interacting with client software like webbrowsers. Especially the latter being subject to rapid change over time invariably makes such environments awkward to maintain once funding has ended. Pragmatic approaches have to be found in order to balance the curation effort and the maintainability of access to research data over time.

A sketch of four potential service levels aiming at the long-term availability of research data in the humanities is outlined: (1) Continuous Maintenance, (2) Application Conservation, (3) Application Data Preservation, and (4) Bitstream Preservation. The first being too costly and the last hardly satisfactory in general, we suggest that the implementation of services by an infrastructure provider should concentrate on service levels 2 and 3. We explain their strengths and limitations considering the example of two Scholarly Digital Editions.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Cultural Obstacles to Research Data Management and Sharing at TU Delft"

Esther Plomp et al. have published "Cultural Obstacles to Research Data Management and Sharing at TU Delft" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

Research data management (RDM) is increasingly important in scholarship. Many researchers are, however, unaware of the benefits of good RDM and unsure about the practical steps they can take to improve their RDM practices. Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) addresses this cultural barrier by appointing Data Stewards at every faculty. By providing expert advice and increasing awareness, the Data Stewardship project focuses on incremental improvements in current data and software management and sharing practices. This cultural change is accelerated by the Data Champions who share best practices in data management with their peers. The Data Stewards and Data Champions build a community that allows a discipline-specific approach to RDM. Nevertheless, cultural change also requires appropriate rewards and incentives. While local initiatives are important, and we discuss several examples in this paper, systemic changes to the academic rewards system are needed. This will require collaborative efforts of a broad coalition of stakeholders and we will mention several such initiatives. This article demonstrates that community building is essential in changing the code and data management culture at TU Delft.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Engaging Researchers with Data Management: The Cookbook

Connie Clare, et al. have published "Engaging Researchers with Data Management: The Cookbook".

Here's an excerpt:

Engaging Researchers with Data Management is an invaluable collection of 24 case studies, drawn from institutions across the globe, that demonstrate clearly and practically how to engage the research community with RDM. These case studies together illustrate the variety of innovative strategies research institutions have developed to engage with their researchers about managing research data.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Evaluating Fair Maturity Through a Scalable, Automated, Community-Governed Framework"

Mark D. Wilkinson et al. have published "Evaluating Fair Maturity Through a Scalable, Automated, Community-Governed Framework" in Scientific Data.

Here's an excerpt:

We propose a scalable, automatable framework to evaluate digital resources that encompasses measurable indicators, open source tools, and participation guidelines, which come together to accommodate domain relevant community-defined FAIR assessments. The components of the framework are: (1) Maturity Indicators—community-authored specifications that delimit a specific automatically-measurable FAIR behavior; (2) Compliance Tests—small Web apps that test digital resources against individual Maturity Indicators; and (3) the Evaluator, a Web application that registers, assembles, and applies community-relevant sets of Compliance Tests against a digital resource, and provides a detailed report about what a machine "sees" when it visits that resource. We discuss the technical and social considerations of FAIR assessments, and how this translates to our community-driven infrastructure. We then illustrate how the output of the Evaluator tool can serve as a roadmap to assist data stewards to incrementally and realistically improve the FAIRness of their resources.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 10 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap