Digital Curation & Digital Preservation – Page 8

Washington University Libraries: "New Grant to Preserve Born-Digital Poetry"

The Washington University Libraries were awarded a two-year grant by the Mellon Foundation to support an exploration of essential questions surrounding the acquisition, discoverability, preservation, and use of born-digital poetry collections. The $250,000 award will enable the University Libraries to develop online resources and systems to process, preserve, and steward the collections of a new generation of digital-native poets. . . .

The first of its kind to focus on issues of acquisition, preservation, and wider access to born-digital materials, the project will process a wide range of digital materials from the archive of poet and academic Mary Jo Bang. Consequently, the project will eventually make it possible for students and researchers to access born-digital collections and gain a better understanding and insight into the unprecedented ways in which poetry is created in a digital era. The project also aims to lay the foundation for new benchmarks and guidelines on preservation and access to born-digital archives at libraries and museums and for personal poetry archives.

https://tinyurl.com/3baahaj5

"Actually Accessible Data: An Update and a Call to Action"

As funder, journal, and disciplinary norms and mandates have foregrounded obligations of data sharing and opportunities for data reuse, the need to plan for and curate data sets that can reach researchers and end-users with disabilities has become even more urgent. We begin by exploring the disability studies literature, describing the need for advocacy and representation of disabled scholars as data creators, subjects, and users. We then survey the landscape of data repositories, curation guidelines, and research-data-related standards, finding little consideration of accessibility for people with disabilities. We suggest three sets of minimal good practices for moving toward truly accessible research data: 1) ensuring Web accessibility for data repositories; 2) ensuring accessibility of common text formats, including those used in documentation; and 3) enhancement of visual and audiovisual materials. We point to some signs of progress in regard to truly accessible data by highlighting exemplary practices by repositories, standards, and data professionals. Accessibility needs to become a mainstream component of curation practice included in every training, manual, and primer.

https://tinyurl.com/2p8p4dau

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"A Decade of Surveys on Attitudes to Data Sharing Highlights Three Factors for Achieving Open Science"

Over a 10 year period Carol Tenopir of DataONE and her team conducted a global survey of scientists, managers and government workers involved in broad environmental science activities about their willingness to share data and their opinion of the resources available to do so. . . .

The most surprising result was that a higher willingness to share data corresponded with a decrease in satisfaction with data sharing resources across nations (e.g., skills, tools, training) (Fig.1). That is, researchers who did not want to share data were satisfied with the available resources, and those that did want to share data were dissatisfied. Researchers appear to only discover that the tools are insufficient when they begin the hard work of engaging in open science practices. This indicates that a cultural shift in the attitudes of researchers needs to precede the development of support and tools for data management.

https://tinyurl.com/4sx54c6d

Data Sharing for Research: A Compendium of Case Studies, Analysis, and Recommendations

This report contains eight case studies that look at specific corporate/academic data-sharing partnerships in depth, from initiation through the publication of research findings. These case studies illuminate practical challenges for implementing corporate data sharing with researchers. Some common themes that emerged from the case studies include:

Successful data-sharing partnerships use Data-Sharing Agreements that require both the company and researchers to take steps to protect privacy.

Some of the challenges of data sharing include technical knowledge and infrastructure gaps between companies and researchers, and the continuing need for ethics and privacy review for industry-based research.

Promising practices for data sharing include the use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies and company-created, public-facing data-sharing menus to facilitate new partnerships.

While data sharing has significant costs and inherent risks, the risks can be managed, and the benefits to researchers, companies, and society make data sharing worth the effort.

https://tinyurl.com/a9axcscp

"Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media"

Late Friday, some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. . . .

Of note, the Great 78 Project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove.

These preservation recordings are used in teaching and research, including by university professors like Jason Luther of Rowan University, whose students use the Great 78 collection as the basis for researching and writing podcasts for use in class assignments . . . While this mode of access is important, usage is tiny—on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one researcher per month.

https://tinyurl.com/bdevycm5

"Research Reproducibility Activities in Health Sciences Libraries"

Within medical and health sciences libraries, research reproducibility work and services are seldom described in those terms, and are often hidden within other data services. RR work is highly dependent on institutional context, such as availability of partners and institutional needs. Most of the RR work is handled by individuals or teams who tend to focus on data services broadly. Meaningful assessment of the work is not done well at present. Getting administrators, researchers, and other stakeholders to associate the library with RR is a particular challenge. Librarians who are interested in RR could learn from others who are doing the work, understand their institutional context, identify relevant institutional partners, and model RR practices in their own work.

https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.650

"Actually Accessible Data: An Update and a Call to Action"

As funder, journal, and disciplinary norms and mandates have foregrounded obligations of data sharing and opportunities for data reuse, the need to plan for and curate data sets that can reach researchers and end-users with disabilities has become even more urgent. We begin by exploring the disability studies literature, describing the need for advocacy and representation of disabled scholars as data creators, subjects, and users. We then survey the landscape of data repositories, curation guidelines, and research-data-related standards, finding little consideration of accessibility for people with disabilities. We suggest three sets of minimal good practices for moving toward truly accessible research data: 1) ensuring Web accessibility for data repositories; 2) ensuring accessibility of common text formats, including those used in documentation; and 3) enhancement of visual and audiovisual materials. We point to some signs of progress in regard to truly accessible data by highlighting exemplary practices by repositories, standards, and data professionals. Accessibility needs to become a mainstream component of curation practice included in every training, manual, and primer.

https://tinyurl.com/2p4au2ar

"Data Journals: Where Data Sharing Policy Meets Practice"

Data journals incorporate elements of traditional scholarly communications practices—reviewing for quality and rigor through editorial and peer-review—and the data sharing / open data movement—prioritizing broad dissemination through repositories, sometimes with curation or technical checks. Their goals for dataset review and sharing are recorded in journal-based data policies and operationalized through workflows. In this qualitative, small cohort semi-structured interview study of eight different journals that review and publish research data, we explored (1) journal data policy requirements, (2) data review standards, and (3) implementation of standardized data evaluation workflows. Differences among the journals can be understood by considering editors’ approaches to balancing the interests of varied stakeholders. Assessing data quality for reusability is primarily conditional on fitness for use which points to an important distinction between disciplinary and discipline-agnostic data journals.

https://doi.org/10.17615/nqtz-b568

"Who Re-Uses Data? A Bibliometric Analysis of Dataset Citations"

Open data is receiving increased attention and support in academic environments, with one justification being that shared data may be re-used in further research. But what evidence exists for such re-use, and what is the relationship between the producers of shared datasets and researchers who use them? Using a sample of data citations from OpenAlex, this study investigates the relationship between creators and citers of datasets at the individual, institutional, and national levels. We find that the vast majority of datasets have no recorded citations, and that most cited datasets only have a single citation. Rates of self-citation by individuals and institutions tend towards the low end of previous findings and vary widely across disciplines. At the country level, the United States is by far the most prominent exporter of re-used datasets, while importation is more evenly distributed. Understanding where and how the sharing of data between researchers, institutions, and countries takes place is essential to developing open research practices.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04379

"Metadata Standard for Continuous Preservation, Discovery, and Reuse of Research Data in Repositories by Higher Education Institutions: A Systematic Review"

This systematic review synthesised existing research papers that explore the available metadata standards to enable researchers to preserve, discover, and reuse research data in repositories. This review provides a broad overview of certain aspects that must be taken into consideration when creating and assessing metadata standards to enhance research data preservation discoverability and reusability strategies. Research papers on metadata standards, research data preservation, discovery and reuse, and repositories published between January 2003 and April 2023 were reviewed from a total of five databases. The review retrieved 1597 papers, and 13 papers were selected in this review. We revealed 13 research articles that explained the creation and application of metadata standards to enhance preservation, discovery, and reuse of research data in repositories. Among them, eight presented the three main types of metadata, descriptive, structural, and administrative, to enable the preservation of research data in data repositories. We noted limited evidence on how these metadata standards can be used to enhance the discovery and reuse of research data in repositories to enable the preservation, discovery, and reuse of research data in repositories. No reviews indicated specific higher education institutions employing metadata standards for the research data created by their researchers. Repository designs and a lack of expertise and technology know-how were among the challenges identified from the reviewed papers. The review has the potential to influence professional practice and decision-making by stakeholders, including researchers, students, librarians, information communication technologists, data managers, private and public organisations, intermediaries, research institutions, and non-profit organizations.

https://doi.org/10.3390/info14080427

"ARL Awarded Grant to Continue Research on Institutional Expenses for Public Access to Research Data"

The US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in collaboration with Duke University, the University of Minnesota, and Washington University in St. Louis, all of whom are members of the Data Curation Network (DCN), a $741,921 National Leadership Grant to examine institutional expenses for public access to research data. This research builds upon ARL’s existing Realities of Academic Data Sharing initiative.

https://tinyurl.com/378dzab6

"Images, an Overview"

Images have been historical records since the advent of photography. High-resolution photography laid the groundwork for the digitization process known today and has continued to bolster the cultural heritage sector. An overview of images in the context of library and information science (LIS) is a story of how libraries have adopted aspects of the commercial image production environment, expensive digitization equipment, and considerable information technology infrastructure to provide image resources to their users. This entry [of the Encyclopedia of Libraries, Librarianship, and Information Science] discusses images in the LIS field and considers the concepts, tools, and best practices that surround the prevalence of images as primary sources.

https://hdl.handle.net/10657/15041

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Association of Research Libraries and California Digital Library Receive Grant to Advance Data Management and Sharing"

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have received a $668,048 National Leadership Grant from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to assist institutions in managing and sharing federally funded research data. This project will build a machine-actionable data-management plan (maDMP) tool by enhancing and developing new DMPTool features utilizing persistent identifiers (PIDs). CDL and ARL will work together to further strengthen institutional capacity for tracking research outputs by piloting the institutional integration of maDMPs across an academic campus and building community across institutions for maDMPs.

https://tinyurl.com/35x9d45z

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Progressing with Patience: An Unflinching Look at the Challenges of Digital Preservation"

Many academic libraries have devoted significant time, resources, and strategy to developing approaches that steward digital assets responsibly into the future. This paper examines how one academic library’s experience [University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas] with this work has progressed over nearly a decade, and compares the experience to trends in the field. The point of view of technical services, digital collections, and management, are represented and specific workflows are shared. The paper takes a close look at challenges faced, explains how strategy has evolved over time, and shares examples of how other organizations might benefit from a shift in how progress is assessed through a new perspective on success.

https://repository.ifla.org/handle/123456789/2689

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"New at Dryad: Support for NIH-funded researchers"

Dryad provides a simple submission process that makes it easy for researchers to upload your datasets, apply metadata that makes them discoverable and reusable, and get a persistent identifier (DOI) you can use in grant reporting. Once submitted, datasets are made publicly accessible so they can be reused by others in order to advance scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplines. Dryad also provides an extensive library of existing datasets from various sources, including those funded by NIH grants, that are completely free to access and reuse.

https://tinyurl.com/4uu9tz2r

Paywall: "Human-AI Interaction for Exploratory Search & Recommender Systems with Application to Cultural Heritage "

This dissertation introduces three primary contributions through publicly deployed sys- tems and datasets. First, we demonstrate how the construction of large-scale cultural heritage datasets using machine learning can answer interdisciplinary questions in library & information science and the humanities (Chapter 2). Second, based on the feedback of users of these cultural heritage datasets, we introduce open faceted search, an extension of faceted search that leverages human-AI interaction affordances to empower users to define their own facets in an open domain fashion (Chapter 3). Third, encountering similar challenges with the deluge of scientific papers, we explore the question of how to improve recommender systems through human-AI interaction and tackle the broad challenge of advice taking for opaque machine learners (Chapter 4).

https://tinyurl.com/yc59txc5

"eLife and PREreview to Enhance the ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ Ecosystem Through Adoption of COAR Notify"

The project will put in place the basic infrastructure and protocols needed for all-round and standardised connections between preprint repositories, community-led preprint review platforms, journals, and preprint review aggregation and curation platforms. The aim is to lower existing technological and cost barriers so that as many of these services as possible can more easily participate in the ‘publish, review, curate’ future for research.

https://tinyurl.com/36emyk9b

"Policy Recommendations to Ensure That Research Software Is Openly Accessible and Reusable"

There is now an opportunity to expand US federal policies in similar ways and align their research software sharing aspects across agencies.

To do this, we recommend:

As part of their updated policy plans submitted in response to the 2022 OSTP memo, US federal agencies should, at a minimum, articulate a pathway for developing guidance on research software sharing, and, at a maximum, incorporate research software sharing requirements as a necessary extension of any data sharing policy and a critical strategy to make data truly FAIR (as these principles have been adapted to apply to research software [12]).

As part of sharing requirements, federal agencies should specify that research software should be deposited in trusted, public repositories that maximize discovery, collaborative development, version control, long-term preservation, and other key elements of the National Science and Technology Council’s "Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research" [13], as adapted to fit the unique considerations of research software.

US federal agencies should encourage grantees to use non-proprietary software and file formats, whenever possible, to collect and store data. We realize that for some research areas and specialized techniques, viable non-proprietary software may not exist for data collection. However, in many cases, files can be exported and shared using non-proprietary formats or scripts can be provided to allow others to open files.

Consistent with the US Administration’s approach to cybersecurity [<14], federal agencies should provide clear guidance on measures grantees are expected to undertake to ensure the security and integrity of research software. This guidance should encompass the design, development, dissemination, and documentation of research software. Examples include the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s secure software development framework and Linux Foundation’s open source security foundation.

As part of the allowable costs that grantees can request to help them meet research sharing requirements, US federal agencies should include reasonable costs associated with developing and maintaining research software needed to maximize data accessibility and reusability for as long as it is practical. Federal agencies should ensure that such costs are additive to proposal budgets, rather than consuming funds that would otherwise go to the research itself.

US federal agencies should encourage grantees to apply licenses to their research software that facilitate replication, reuse, and extensibility, while balancing individual and institutional intellectual property considerations. Agencies can point grantees to guidance on desirable criteria for distribution terms and approved licenses from the Open Source Initiative.

In parallel with the actions listed above that can be immediately incorporated into new public access plans, US federal agencies should also explore long-term strategies to elevate research software to co-equal research outputs and further incentivize its maintenance and sharing to improve research reproducibility, replicability, and integrity.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002204

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Trends in Research Data Management and Academic Health Sciences Libraries"

Spurred by the National Institute of Health mandating a data management and sharing plan as a requirement of grant funding, research data management has exploded in importance for librarians supporting researchers and research institutions. This editorial examines the role and direction of libraries in this process from several viewpoints. Key markers of success include collaboration, establishing new relationships, leveraging existing relationships, accessing multiple avenues of communication, and building niche expertise and cachè as a valued and trustworthy partner. [Article includes case studies.]

https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2023.2218776

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"How Are Exclusively Data Journals Indexed in Major Scholarly Databases? An Examination of the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex"

As part of the data-driven paradigm and open science movement, the data paper is becoming a popular way for researchers to publish their research data, based on academic norms that cross knowledge domains. Data journals have also been created to host this new academic genre. The growing number of data papers and journals has made them an important large-scale data source for understanding how research data is published and reused in our research system. One barrier to this research agenda is a lack of knowledge as to how data journals and their publications are indexed in the scholarly databases used for quantitative analysis. To address this gap, this study examines how a list of 18 exclusively data journals (i.e., journals that primarily accept data papers) are indexed in four popular scholarly databases: the Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex. We investigate how comprehensively these databases cover the selected data journals and, in particular, how they present the document type information of data papers. We find that the coverage of data papers, as well as their document type information, is highly inconsistent across databases, which creates major challenges for future efforts to study them quantitatively. As a result, we argue that efforts should be made by data journals and databases to improve the quality of metadata for this emerging genre.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09704

"Prevalence and Predictors of Data and Code Sharing in the Medical and Health Sciences: Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis of Individual Participant Data"

The review found that public code sharing was persistently low across medical research. Declarations of data sharing were also low, increasing over time, but did not always correspond to actual sharing of data. The effectiveness of mandatory data sharing policies varied substantially by journal and type of data, a finding that might be informative for policy makers when designing policies and allocating resources to audit compliance.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2023-075767

Directions in Digital Scholarship: Support for Digital, Data-Intensive, and Computational Research in Academic Libraries

This report of a 2023 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) initiative takes a broad look at library engagement with digital scholarship (DS) and examines connections with data-intensive and computational research over roughly the past five years and into the future. . . . To understand trends in DS programs, including attention to the impact of the pandemic, especially with reference to the importance of physical spaces and in-person programming, evidence was gathered from several sources, including online interviews with 12 library and DS leaders, profiles of 47 libraries’ DS programs, and conversations during two online forums representing a total of 24 institutions. Findings from these sources are analyzed and synthesized in this report.

https://tinyurl.com/398nzhcx

"Signing Data Citations Enables Data Verification and Citation Persistence"

Increasingly, digital datasets are being published with assigned identifiers, then cited in papers as the basis for repeatable experiments. To help future readers find and verify data, customary citations can be extended with content signatures, which can be introduced without having to replace existing identifier such as DOIs and ARKs. That is, signatures can be seen as complementary identifiers to help keep specific versions of cited data findable and identifiable as they evolve and change locations. For example, if a DOI identifies an evolving dataset, rather than a fixed version — i.e., content drift is expected — the DOI can safely be cited for the sake of attribution, metadata linking, and citation statistics (e.g., by Crossref (https://www.crossref.org) and DataCite (https://datacite.org)), while the content signature helps the reader find the exact content that was cited, possibly with assistance from metadata linked to the DOI. Additionally, a citation that includes both the DOI (for example) and content signature of a dataset creates a fixed mapping between the two identifiers. Then, unintentional content drift by the DOI can be detected and reported, and an alternative location may potentially be discovered by consulting public content signature registries.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02230-y

"Archiving Website-Based References in Academic Papers: Problems Caused by Reference Rot, Potential Solutions and Limitations"

With this background in mind, this paper has three objectives. First, it provides several examples of studies that have attempted to quantify or characterize reference rot of web-based references, and consequences of this phenomenon. Second, we provide a short practical ‘manual’ that would allow academics or editors to manually archive web-based references at the Internet Archive. Third, we assess some technical and practical suggestions for improving the landscape of digital information preservation while taking into account human and technological limitations.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1560

"Build, Access, Analyze: Introducing ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub)"

ARCH helps users easily conduct and support computational research with digital collections at scale — e.g., text and data mining, data science, digital scholarship, machine learning, and more. Users can build custom research collections relevant to a wide range of subjects, generate and access research-ready datasets from collections, and analyze those datasets. In line with best practices in reproducibility, ARCH supports open publication and preservation of user-generated datasets. ARCH is currently optimized for working with tens of thousands of web archive collections, covering a broad range of subjects, events, and timeframes, and the platform is actively expanding to include digitized text and image collections. ARCH also works with various portions of the overall Wayback Machine global web archive totaling 50+ PB going back to 1996, representing an extensive archive of contemporary history and communication.

https://tinyurl.com/z9c83dut