DataShare deliverables over last 6 months

Having just submitted our October progress report, it seems we've accomplished quite a lot over the last 6 months. Not bad, considering it included summertime!

Summary:
The project has changed some of its deliverables following the change in LSE’s status to an associate partner due to staffing shortages; this includes a greater emphasis on data audits at each of the remaining partners to reach out to users earlier in the data lifecycle and to better meet their needs for support in data management. Edinburgh participated in the Data Audit Framework Development project led by HATII/DCC at University of Glasgow and conducted its own DAF Implementation project, both funded by JISC, and led by Robin Rice, with a new team member, Cuna Ekmekcioglu.

The project members have continued to engage with contacts at UK and international institutions – especially in the US and Australia - who are building services for data sharing. The project team has participated in professional development activities, and disseminated deliverables at conferences, in articles, and through their website and blog. A briefing paper on geo-spatial Web 2.0 visualisation tools was written. The findings from Oxford’s Scoping digital repository services for research data management project were disseminated. Several project team members participated in the Edinburgh Repository Fringe, along with peer projects amongst the partners, e.g. Kultur and EdShare (Southampton), ShareGeo and the Depot
(EDINA), and the CRIG International Roadshow (Oxford). An article in Online by Luis Martinez Uribe and Stuart Macdonald and an interview in CILIPS Update brought attention to the profession of data librarians, which was further amplified by the recent JISC-commissioned report by Key Perspectives, The Skills, Role and Career Structure of Data Scientists.

The partners have created and received peer review on a Dublin Core based metadata schema for datasets in DSpace and EPrints, worked on procedures for storing and preserving databases, and have developed a content model for a database of sound files in Fedora. The Edinburgh DataShare repository was soft-launched, with an option for depositors to append the open data license developed by the Open Data Commons.

The progress report also includes specific progress made at each partner institution and a new evaluation plan, to be carried out by Sheila Anderson at Kings College London.