Data, Librarians, and Services

TICER 2010

Dr Andrew TreloarDirector of Technology, ANDS

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Contents Data – the past and the future Data and scholarly communications Data problems in published literature Why re-use data? Data sharing services and librarians’ role

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A historical perspective Data capture and management problems have

been with us for a while… But for how long? And what are some of the basic operations?

Create

Store

Describe

Discover

Preserve

Doomed data

In the vill in which St. Peter’s Church is situated [Westminster] the abbot of the same place holds 13½ hides. There is land for 11 ploughs. To the demesne belongs 9 hides and 1 virgate, and there are 4 ploughs. The villeins have 6 ploughs, and there could be 1 plough more. There are 9 villeins each on 1 virgate and 1 villein on 1 hide, and 9 villeins on each half a virgate and 1 cottar on 5 acres, and 41 cottars who pay 40 shillings a year for their gardens. [There is] Meadow for 11 ploughs, pasture for the livestock of the vill, woodland for 100 pigs, and 25 houses of the abbot’s knights and other men who pay 8 shillings a year. In all it is worth £10; when received, the same; TRE £12. This manor belonged and belongs to the demesne of St. Peter’s Church

http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/focuson/domesday/take-a-closer-look/

“A Correct Tide-Table, Shewing the True Times of the High-Waters at London-Bridge, to Every Day in the Year 1683. By Mr. Flamstead”Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 13, (1683), pp. 10-15

“An Observation of the Beginning of the Lunar Eclipse which Hapned Aug. 19. 1681. in the Morning, Made on the Island of St. Lawrence or Madagascar, by Mr. Tho. Heathcot, and Communicated by Mr. Flamstead”Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 13, (1683), p. 15

Data problems in published literature

Inconvenient data

DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2005.1569

Imprisoned data

DOI 10.1098/rsta.2006.1793

Invisible data

DOI 10.1098/rsta.2006.1793

Inaccessible data

Missing negative data Need title capture for negative results

GROUP EXERCISE #1

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Why Data? Why Now? We are in an era of increasing data-intensive research Almost all data is now born digital Increasing amount of data generated

(semi-)automatically “Consequently, increasing effort and therefore funding

will necessarily be diverted to data and data management over time” Towards the Australian Data Commons (TADC), p. 4

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Need for standardisation Software and hardware keep getting cheaper, wetware

keeps getting more expensive Fixing data management problems is enormously

labour intensive and costly “Consequently, standardisation within forms of data

and simplification in the frameworks around retention, storage, access and use of data, and the elimination of differences whose resolution requires labour, must be made, if the on-going keeping and reuse of data is to remain affordable” (TADC, p. 5)

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Bringing data together With more data online, more can be done Possible now to answer questions unrelated to

reasons why data was collected originally Increasing focus on cross-disciplinary science “Consequently greater clarity is needed over control

and access to community-funded data, and the means of aggregating, federating and accessing such data are increasingly important” (TADC, p. 5)

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Why re-use data? Efficiency Validation Integrity Value for money Self-interest

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Astronomy case study Hubble Space Telescope (HST) operating since 1990 Observations are proposed, and if accepted, data is collected

and made available to the proposers – who then write a research paper

Each year around 1,000 proposals are reviewed and approximately 200 are selected, for a total of 20,000 individual observations

Data is stored at the Space Telescope Science Institute and made available after embargo period

There are now more research papers written by “second use” of the research data, than by the use initially proposed

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Cancer micro-array trial case study Piwowar, et. al., “Sharing Detailed Research Data Is

Associated with Increased Citation Rate” http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.

0000308 Looked at the citation history of cancer microarray

clinical trial publications Found that publicly available data was associated with

a 69% increase in citations, independently of journal impact factor, date of publication, and author country of origin

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Climate proxy data case study The southern limit of whaling is constrained by sea

ice, and since 1931 whaling records have been collected for every whale caught

Analysis indicates that the Antarctic summer sea-ice edge has moved southwards by 2.8° of latitude between the mid 1950s and early 1970s

This suggests a decline in the area covered by sea ice of some 25%

Nature, Vol 389, 4 Sep 1997, pp. 57-60

Australian National Data Service (ANDS) An initiative of the Australian Government being

conducted as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy ($A24M) and the Super Science Initiative ($A48M)

A collaboration between Monash University, the Australian National University and CSIRO

About 40 staff, funded to mid 2013 More researchers re-using more data more often Data as a first-class object

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Key differentiators Nationally co-ordinated approach Institutionally-focussed engagement

“helping them meet their research data ambitions” But also engaging with large nationally-funded

discipline investments Bulk of funds spent outside ANDS All disciplines covered Focus on data re-use

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What does ANDS provide? Resourcing

community infrastructure projects institutional change funding for data activities, infrastructure development

Online Services ANDS infrastructure to support data registration, identification, publication,

classification, etc Expertise and information

consultancy recommendations, policy, and advice capability building information sharing, sharing experience

Policy advocacy

Australian Research Data Commons

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Building the Australian Research Data Commons

QUESTIONS SO FAR?

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Data Sharing Verbs for Discovery and Reuse

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Plan Planning is important to get research institutions,

managers and researchers to think about issues early, and to make sure steps aren’t missed

Librarians’ role provide leadership and advice develop policies, procedures, planning guidelines get these adapted to, implemented and used in institutions advocate for, and promote, best practice examples

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Create (or Capture) Adding metadata is done most cheaply and

effectively as close as possible to point of creation/capture Treloar/Wilkinson, DOI 10.1109/eScience.2008.41

Librarians’ role advise researchers/technologists on appropriate standards

and metadata schema assist with metadata content quality

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Store Needs to be done well, on institutionally-

supported system/s Librarians’ role

work with researchers to identify appropriate solutions partner with it to ensure availability of solutions use metadata expertise to ameliorate poor metadata

management in data store solutions raise awareness of risks of non-appropriate solutions

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Describe Four kinds of information needed for re-use

information for discovery information for determination of value information for access information for re-use

Librarians’ role use metadata expertise to assist researchers and

technologists with metadata standards

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Identify Persistent identifiers for data provide level of

indirection to assist with long term access DataCite consortium formed in 2009 to assign DOIs

to data objects Librarians’ role

advise researchers on how to cite data (and make it available for citing)

lobby authors of style guides and bibliography mgt systems

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Register Metadata about data can be made available to

registries for discovery and re-use OAI-PMH may be available, DC probably less useful

for data than for documents Librarians’ role

help data infrastructure folks to identify and feed appropriate registries

investigate use of IRs for data and maintain feeds to registries

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Discover Range of discovery options (web search engine,

metadata aggregators, discipline-specific) Librarians’ role

help data store managers to identify right discovery systems to feed

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Access Multiple options

direct link to open-access data link to data store with its own access controls

register/login only for open access (DANS) register/login for restricted access

contact information for how to get data Librarians’ role

advise researchers on IP and rights issues ensure data is managed appropriately in data store

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Exploit Focused on the kinds of things that can be built on

top of data once it is re-usable mashups data fusion cross-disciplinary discovery and visualisation

Librarians’ role assist researchers to locate relevant data provide advice about 3rd party copyright/IP issues and

licensing for data

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Preserve Could have chosen Curate (but this is bigger) or

Migrate (but this is a means not an end) Will require engagement with storage service

providers Librarians’ role

provide expertise in long-term preservation and curation of objects

partner with technologists and archivists to combine all relevant expertise

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GROUP EXERCISE #2

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Conclusion Data is becoming steadily more important for

research Research results need to be communicated Data is the next great challenge for scholarly

communication And so, it should be the next great challenge for

libraries Over to you!

Acknowledgements and Links Thanks to Cathrine Harboe-Ree (University

Librarian) and Sam Searle (Data Management Coordinator), Monash University

ANDS Web Site: http://ands.org.au/ ANDS Services site: http://services.ands.org.au/

Me: andrew.treloar.netands.org.au 46