dsalo
Posts by this author
January 20, 2010
I'm a bit late with these! Sorry about that. Bit busy around me just now.
Data-sharing resolutions/requirements announced recently include: the American Naturalist and allied journals (possibly behind paywall, sorry), and the Linguistics Society of America.
The calls for open data and data…
January 17, 2010
One way and another, I heard quite a lot of talk at Science Online 2010 relevant to the interests of institutional-repository managers and (both would-be and actual) data curators. Some of the lessons learned weren't exactly pleasant, but there's just no substitute for listening to your non-users…
January 17, 2010
I had the following exchange several times during the opening day of Science Online 2010:
Interlocutor: "So what do you do?"
Me: "I'm a librarian."
Interlocutor: *lengthy pause* So… what are you doing here exactly?
Er, what? A conference about science communication? How on earth can that not be…
January 17, 2010
I'm still at Science Online 2010 and will have observations on it later, but first I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate a resource that has been absolutely crucial to my professional career—and indeed, to my profession.
Open Access News, under the able direction of Peter Suber and Gavin Baker, has…
January 8, 2010
Blogging is liable to be sparse next week, as I will be at Science Online 2010 to do a workshop about institutional repositories, and talk about libraries generally alongside the inestimable Stephanie Willen Brown.
Here are the slides for my half of the latter:
So you think you know libraries
I'm…
January 7, 2010
Chris Rusbridge retweeted my tweet last night announcing my previous post. His prefatory comment gave me pause: "Curation by researcher or librarian?"
Er, both? Plus IT? I've never thought anything different, and if I've given the impression that I want to grab the entire pie for librarianship, I…
January 6, 2010
If you're not reading the comments here, you're missing the best part of the blog. Case in point, this comment from the incomparable Chris Rusbridge, which I reproduce as a post so that those who are missing the best part of the blog don't miss it:
Several things I wanted to respond to. You say…
January 4, 2010
I had the honor to participate in a futurist exercise by ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. The short essays they solicited have been placed online; they are well worth perusal. I wish the discussants at ALA's Midwinter gathering a pleasant and stimulating exchange.…
January 2, 2010
Peter Keane has a lengthy and worthwhile piece about the need for a "killer app" in data management. It's too meaty to relegate to a tidbits post; go read it and see what you think, then come back.
My reaction to the piece is complex, and I'm still rereading it to work through my own thoughts. Here…
December 31, 2009
Wishing all of us a happy, prosperous, data-filled 2010.
Unfortunately behind paywall: Nature says (rightly) that it's not quite as simple as "throw the data out there." Combining datasets carelessly may magnify faults in the original, eliminate crucial explanatory variables, or otherwise make a…
December 29, 2009
I wrote last week about name authority control for authors. I hinted that systems are coming. I hope that journals, databases, catalogues, and repositories adopt them when they emerge, the sooner the better.
Even when they do, though, there's an immense problem to solve, in the form of the millions…
December 28, 2009
As I watch the environment around me for signs of data curation inside institutions, particularly in libraries, I seem to see two general classes of approach to the problem. One starts institution-wide, generally with a grand planning process. Another starts at the level of the individual…
December 22, 2009
Every time I do a tidbits post, I think to myself, "gosh, that was a lot of tidbits; I'll never fill up the queue again."
Every time, I'm wrong.
The climate-data scandal staggers on: Gavin Baker has another great summary post, from which I particularly appreciated the Climategate article. We also…
December 18, 2009
Since the end of the year is a fairly quiet time for my particular professional niche, I've taken the opportunity to do some basic name authority control on author name-strings in the repository.
Some basic what on what, now? Welcome back to my series on library information management and jargon.…
December 14, 2009
A common response, including in the comments at Book of Trogool, to raising digital-preservation issues is a chortle of "Guess print doesn't seem so bad now! Let's just print everything out, and then we'll be fine!"
Leaving aside my own visceral irritation at that rather rude and dismissive…
December 9, 2009
I'm at home today owing to last night's epic snowfall in Madison shutting down practically the entire university, so it's time for tidbits!
The biggest data story of the week is the climate-data hijacking. Gavin Baker has the best roundup I've seen. I also strongly recommend Cameron Neylon's…
December 8, 2009
The latest issue of the International Journal of Digital Curation is out; if you're in this space and not at least watching the RSS feed for this journal, you should be.
I was scanning this article on Georgia Tech's libraries' development of a data-curation program when I ran across a real jaw-…
December 7, 2009
This is the question I was asking myself while reading this fairly straightforward paper on open access in high-energy physics (hat tip to Garret McMahon).
It's impossible to be in my particular professional specialty and not know about the trajectory of self-archiving in high-energy physics, but I…
December 4, 2009
There have been a number of piercing calls for training of data professionals (of various stripes) in the last year or so. Schools of information have been answering: Illinois, North Carolina, others.
Honestly, I'm getting a sinking feeling in my stomach. If I were to label it, the label would go…
December 3, 2009
When Steve Hitchcock says that "sustainability must precede preservation for institutional repositories," what does he mean?
Not to put words in Steve's mouth (Steve has plenty of words, all well-chosen), but here's my one-sentence take on it:
A service is sustainable as long as it has a…
December 2, 2009
The tidbits folder is out of control, so this linklist may be a bit epic. My apologies! There's a lot of great discussion in this area of late.
Data repositories: the next new wave Steve Hitchcock is sensible, as usual. The answer to "are repositories changing?" is "they already changed," if one…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 of which have…
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…
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…