The Book of Trogool
Archives for November, 2009
Another reason data services need librarians
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 30, 2009 Some people watch football over Thanksgiving weekend; I get into discussions of disciplinary data regimes with fellow SciBling Christina and others on FriendFeed. Judge me if you must! Another common truism in both the repository and data-management fields is that disciplinary affiliation accounts for a lot of the variation in observed researcher behavior. For once,…
Welcome Planet Code4Lib readers!
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 28, 2009 Book of Trogool has just been added to Planet Code4Lib, a library-technology blog reader. I am of course honored to be in some very fine company. I have a mixed readership here: librarians, technology pros, researchers from several disciplines. I encourage all my readers to pop over to take a look at Planet Code4Lib. If…
Peer review, data quality, and usage metrics
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 24, 2009 Another case of things connecting up oddly in my head? “How do we know whether a dataset is any good?” is a vexed question in this space. Because the academy is accustomed to answering quality questions with peer review, peer review is sometimes adduced as part of the solution for data as well. As Gideon…
Sustainability: the institutional fiefdom
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 24, 2009 Some interesting ferment happening in repository-land, notably this discussion of various types and scales of repositories and how successful they can expect to be given the structural conditions in which they are embedded. I don’t blog repositories per se any more, so I’m not going to address the paper in detail (though I do think…
Tidbits, 20 November 2009
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 20, 2009 Have some Friday tidbits! An important biology dataset is losing NSF funding and may fold. Nor (as the article explains) is it the only one. It is impossible to overstate the desperate gravity of the data-sustainability question. Academic libraries, if we are not the white knights here?and we certainly have been in the past; witness…
… and then what?
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 17, 2009 It can be difficult to convince present-focused researchers to give a long-term perspective, such as that of a librarian or archivist, the time of day. (So to speak.) Here’s my favorite way to do it: the “? and then what?” game. You have digital data. You think it’s important. We’ll start from there. Your grant…
Tracking my eyes
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 16, 2009 I got a very nice email the other day thanking me for being a clearinghouse for e-research information. I’m not quite sure I am that, but just in case I’ve become it without noticing? What I read in the area and think is worthwhile enough to keep around ends up in a few places, all…
The basic carrot: usage statistics
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 16, 2009 BMC Bioinformatics published this article describing a “data publishing framework” for biodiversity data. Stripped to its essentials, this article is about carrots for data sharing. Acknowledging that cultural inertia (some of it well-founded) militates against spontaneous data sharing, the authors suggest a way forward. I’m calling this one out because it has implications for storage-system…
International Digital Curation Conference
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 13, 2009 By way of amplifying the signal: the 5th International Digital Curation Conference is coming up in London in December. I will be there in spirit only, I fear, but I hope there will be a Twitter hashtag I can follow? Chris Rusbridge has blogged the program. (If I seem more scatterbrained than usual, it’s because…
Poll: Where are the institutional programs?
Posted by Dorothea Salo on November 12, 2009 This is a pushmi-pullyu post. I need some help with an environmental scan, so I’ll get us started and the rest of you smart folks can amplify my knowledge. I want to understand what’s going on where with data curation specifically at the institutional level (no NOAA, no ICPSR, none of that) Stateside. Grant-funded is…