[Dspace-general] Archiving research data sets

Tue Jul 17 04:09:39 EDT 2007

Hi,

Regarding deposit of research data sets in institutional repositories, this
is the topic of a new UK project funded under the JISC Repositories and
Preservation Programme, called DataShare, in which social science data
librarians/managers and repository managers will work together to develop
policies, good practice, and exemplars using DSpace, EPrints and Fedora
software at four universities: Edinburgh, Southampton, Oxford, and London
School of Economics.

It's early days for us, but at the University of Edinburgh data librarians
are working with digital library staff running the Edinburgh Research
Archive to establish a related DSpace repository for research datasets to
enhance the existing IR service - and to connect 'orphaned' (non-archived)
datasets with papers on which they are based in the ERA.

Project staff intend to target early adopter depositors in each of our
institutions in the area of social science (quantitative) datasets. One of
our workpackages involves experimenting with domain-specific XML metadata
(DDI or Data Documementation Initiative) and probably bundling the metadata
record with the dataset in the same way as described below for environmental
datasets.

We will be studying social science data archiving guidelines for deposit to
major social science data archives, e.g. ICPSR,
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/access/deposit/guidelines.html
and the UK Data Archive, http://www.esds.ac.uk/aandp/create/depintro.asp
but adapting procedures and forms for each of our institutions and with the
lighter touch needed for self-archiving.

The project manager would very much like to be in contact with other
repositories pursuing deposit of research datasets. A brief project
description page is available here, with a fuller website designed to
monitor new developments in this arena coming soon.
http://edina.ac.uk/projects/datashare_summary.html

Best wishes

Theo 

-----Original Message-----
From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu]
On Behalf Of Gail Steinhart
Sent: 12 July 2007 18:02
To: dspace-general at mit.edu
Subject: [Dspace-general] Archiving research data sets

Dear Ina,

We're starting to deposit scientific data sets (just ecological data so far)
in our institutional repository. It would be interesting to hear what other
people are doing.

We provide researchers with some recommendations on formatting data -
derived from various sources, including (among others):
- Best Practices for Preparing Ecological Data Sets to Share and Archive
(ORNL-DAAC): http://www.daac.ornl.gov/PI/bestprac.html
<http://www.daac.ornl.gov/PI/bestprac.html>
- Ecological data : design, management, and processing. 2000.
Authors:Michener,William K.; Brunt,James W.

These include fairly common sense recommendations and apply mostly to
tabular data. We also recommend that researchers save their data to a format
that is more stable for preservation - tab- or comma-delimited text, for
example, rather than an Excel spreadsheet. We haven't considered
recommending XML as a format - I'd be curious if anyone else has given that
any thought.

We ALSO encourage researchers to deposit data in a domain repository, if one
exists. If one exists, there may also exist a discipline-specific metadata
standard that more fully describes the data than DSpace metadata can. In our
case we recommend ecologists use EML (Ecological Metadata Langauge) and
deposit the EML record along with the dataset in our DSpace installation -
as well as depositing data and metadata in the KNB (Knowledge Network for
Biocomplexity). See for example http://hdl.handle.net/1813/7763
<http://hdl.handle.net/1813/7763>  for a DSpace submission that has an EML
record with it. 

That's our approach so far - I'd be very interested in hearing what other
people are doing, or reactions to this.

Best regards,
Gail

	Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:45:33 +0200
	From: "Ina Smith" <Ina.Smith at up.ac.za>
	Subject: [Dspace-general] Archiving research data sets
	To: dspace-general at mit.edu
	Message-ID: <4696226D.1050.00C0.0 at up.ac.za>
	Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15"

	Good day

	We would like to start submitting our original research data sets to
our DSpace institutional research repository (i.e. for digital curation
purposes). Have any of you out there tried it, or can you perhaps recommend
best practices in this regard? Examples of how you have implemented it will
also be very helpful.

	It will be much appreciated! Many thanks in advance.

	Kind regards,
	Ina

	Ina Smith 
	Digital Research Repository (UPSpace) Manager & eApplication
Specialist
	Academic Information Service
	University of Pretoria
	Pretoria
	0002
	South Africa

	Tel.: +27 12 420 3082
	Fax: +27 12 362 5100
	E-mail: ina.smith at up.ac.za 
	http://www.ais.up.ac.za <http://www.ais.up.ac.za/>  

Gail Steinhart
Research Data & Environmental Sciences Librarian Albert R. Mann Library
Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853

Phone: 607-255-7251
Fax: 607-255-0318
E-mail: GSS1 at cornell.edu