New Roles for Libraries in Supporting Data-Intensive Research and Advancing Scholarly Communication

This talk will explore potential roles for libraries in support of data-intensive research and inquiry. Scholars and researchers from many disciplines are using vast amounts of data to advance our understanding of both the physical nature of our world and its place in the universe, as well as to gain new insights into the behaviors of societies and individuals. Humanists are rapidly integrating newly digitized corpora, digital representations of material culture and spatial and temporal indexed data into their scholarly endeavors. Libraries have undergone significant transformation in confronting the “digital deluge” and incorporating digital content into their holdings. However assuming responsibilities for large-scale data-intensive research presents significantly new and larger challenges. These will be examined in this talk as well as potential new roles for libraries for advancing scholarly communication.

DCXL: Facilitating data stewardship practices for scientists

Data management and archiving is a pressing and relevant current issue in the research community.  The Data Curation for Excel (DCXL) project's goal is to facilitate data management, sharing, and archiving for scientists.  To do this, we are building an open-source add-in for Microsoft Excel that will assist individuals in preparing their data for archiving.  This will be accomplished with four major functionalities: (1) check for archive readiness, (2) help create standard metadata, (3) get an identifier, and (4) deposit the data into a repository. DCXL combines several services offered by the California Digital Library, thereby building on existing tools that enable digital curation.

Supporting Data-Rich Research on Many Fronts

The deluge of data artifacts produced by data-intensive research presents a huge and complex problem.  Little of this data is shared, re-used, or preserved in the scientific record.  Because it is "unpublished" in traditional scholarly terms, neither libraries nor scientists know how to deal with it.  At the California Digital Library (CDL) we're nibbling away on several fronts to try to shrink the "data curation" problem to a more manageable size.  A survey of efforts on these fronts touches upon data papers, data citation, identifier and repository services, repository federation, and data management planning.