Research data into Fedora at Oxford

The JISC funded DISC-UK DataShare project in Oxford has brought together several units within the collegiate University: the Oxford University

Library Services, the Nuffield College Data Library, the Oxford University Computing Services and the Oxford e-Research Centre.

This post looks into some of the work carried out by my colleagues in the Library to explore ways to manage research data into Fedora. These efforts are recounted in the blog of Ben O'Steen, Oxford Research Archive Software Engineer. 

Some months ago Ben already provided an exceptional account of the challenges encountered when ingesting a research dataset into FEDORA. He described how he dealt with the modelling and storing of a phonetics dataset given to him on a DVD-R, containing around 600 audio files organized in a hierarchical structure.

In a more recent post Ben talks again about storing, curating and presenting research data. This time he focuses on tabular data and highlights the importance of capturing the implicit information (columns data types, table interlinks), keeping the original dataset as well as maintaining a version of the data in a well-understood format with a description of the tables in a machine readable way.

This post also identifies a gap in institutional and departmental  IT support for those researchers needing to store tables of data and suggests HBase as the type of basic service that could be provided to avoid the free-form tabular datasets as well as to educate researchers.

All this work has been taking place in parallel to the scoping study I have been conducting in the last 15 months to scope the requirements for services to manage and curate data. This project is, like DataShare, finishing at the end of March but there will certainly be more data management and curation related activities in the University of Oxford.  

  

Data Walkabout 7: Melbourne

My last Data Walkabout stop, Melbourne, coincided with both the Australian Open and a 44C/110F heat wave (but preceded the terrible bush fires in Victoria). Sam Searle, Data Management Coordinator for Monash University Library, was my highly organised host (pictured). She not only arranged a sell-out seminar for me at Monash, but also a lift to Clayton campus with Peter Mathews (Monash University Library Planning Executive) and another back with Gaby Bright (eResearch Communication, VERSI) in time for a full afternoon of meetings at the University of Melbourne. (Considering that train tracks were buckling from the heat, I was very grateful for the escorts!)

The seminar (slides & podcast) led to a lot of thoughtful questions: how to determine data quality and value, how far should institutional data policies go, would we be doing more data audits at Edinburgh, are there services for data documentation, what licensing should be used for data access, how much is data downloaded or re-used, and how could the 'new role' of data librarian (in reference to Alma Swan's report) work with liaison librarians to deliver data management services across the university?

Afterwards I was invited for a sandwich lunch (indoors, thank goodness!) with colleagues from the Library, the eResearch Centre at Monash and ANDS - Monash being the lead partner on the Australia National Data Service. While we lunched, Sam gave a presentation on her role and the Library's activities in data management. As a coordinator, she provides the Library's interface with other university services and contact librarians (akin to liaison librarians). Her work revolves around four themes, which are borrowed from ANDS: 1) Communications, advocacy and outreach, 2) Policy and planning, with oversight by the Research Data Management Subcomittee and Advisory Group, 3) Data management in practice: working with early adopters and the eResearch Centre, 4) Skills and expertise - for early career researchers and postgrads, but also for contact librarians, and 5) Leadership and Collaboration. She took inspiration from Martin Lewis' Library Data Pyramid (presented at the keynote at the 2008 DCC conference reproduced above), but what impresses me is that the library at Monash is active in all areas in the diagram.

Then I heard updates from around the table, first from Paul Bonnington, recently departed from the University of Auckland to lead Monash eResearch Centre. Then, Anthony Beitz, Technical Manager of the Centre, filled me in on a number of innovations: LaRDS is a Large Research Data Store - 1.3 petabytes - researchers can access it from a desktop via Novell or NFS (network file system). Applications for collaboration include Sakai and Confluence (enterprise wiki). The ARCHER set of eResearch tools are customised to the needs of crystallographers, but are designed to be generic for different points on the scientific workflow - such as data capture from scientific instruments, to managing and analysing data, and on to collaboration. These are open source and available to be adopted. Again, I heard the merits of Mediaflux, developed by a Melbourne-based company, as a digital asset management system to store & view still and video images, based on XML.

The Centre provides other solutions for data management including cloud computing. (In cloud computing, users pay to move data in or out of the cloud, but pay nothing to analyse it.) The Library's institutional repository could still provide the means of publishing data: for example the Fedora repository may hold a metadata record and a permanent identifier, linking to the data in the cloud (Amazon or an equivalent). This would help address issues such as university branding. A similar method is envisaged for linking to data in LaRDS.

Then David Groenewegen updated me on ANDS. These are early days but they are testing out their ideas in real situations - particularly through the crystallographers' TARDIS project. They are still building up a team - branching out from Monash University and Australia National University (ANU) to have staff in every Australian state. He explained the ORCA registry, middleware that generates web pages (for Google to index, say) about datasets, names, subject area, and institution - generated automatically with hyperlinks and permanent identifiers. I asked about the issues of a name authority: People Australia from Australia National Library assigns a unique ID to authors and individuals as subjects. Since some authors do not appear in monographs but only in serials, ANU has developed a workaround for identifying names of people - some pages still have to be added by hand.

A challenge ANDS faces currently is how to work within disciplines, as well as institutions. Collaborations take place globally, so where there are existing disciplinary-based data sharing mechanisms, ANDS intends to adapt to those interfaces. In working with institutions, the main challenge is building capacity. Universities have signed up to the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, but there's not necessarily sufficient infrastructure in place. ANDS' sister project, ARCS, is one answer, and has funds to build a nationwide 'data fabric'. ANDS is considering providing a 'repository in a box' via SRB/IRODS, to institutions. Seeding the Commons continues to be their motto - now they just have to give it a go.

Later on at the University of Melbourne, Simon Porter, Information Manager (Research) from the eScholarship Research Centre demonstrated the Find An Expert system, which contains contact details, projects, and publications of all academic staff. He is working with the Library and the Research Office to streamline flow of research information into the repository, OPAC, and the web directory. Simon strongly believes staff should not have to enter information that already exists elsewhere. This ethos, combined with an opt-out policy, means the system is information-rich without the staff even ever seeing their own web pages. Simon has an engaging way of explaining his work, such as this paper for a forthcoming Australian Educause conference, A ’Facebook’ for Research.

Donna McRostie, Director, Information Management, invited me to a discussion with the Discipline Librarians group meeting in the late afternoon, and Jenny Ellis (Director, Scholarly Information) kindly escorted me across campus and out of the scorching heat to find the room. The VERSI team (Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative), whose meeting kept getting pushed back later and later in the day, treated me to drinks after 5 instead, for further data discussion. I'm afraid I didn't take notes, but many thanks to Gaby, Simon, Ann Borda, A.B.M. Russel and Lyle Winton for an interesting and fun evening! Also to Ross Wilkinson, Executive Director of ANDS, for meeting me for a coffee the next - my last - day, and to Helen Hayes, Knowledge Transfer Director, for lunch. It was great to see Helen again, I had last known her as the Vice Principal of Knowledge Management and Librarian to the University of Edinburgh. It is, as they say, a small world after all.

Data Walkabout 6: Brisbane, University of Queensland

From the city centre, it is a pleasant and fast ferry ride up the Brisbane River to the University of Queensland. This next Data Walkabout stop gave me the chance to chat with the dynamic Belinda Weaver (at yet another outdoor campus cafe). Although she's on secondment and not currently working on the institutional repository, my impression is that she's accomplished so much already she could be allowed to take a break.

I inquired about the institutional survey which she initiated and Margaret Henty expanded to other universities, Investigating Data Management Practices in Australian Universities. The outcomes provide a baseline of evidence at each participating institution but, like so much else in
Australia, they don't stop there, but take action to foster change.

The status quo for data management amongst researchers was - perhaps depressingly - found to be much the same as that in the UK (through SToRE, DAF and other surveys): often a junior researcher is put in charge, there is no standard practice, there aren't rewards for doing things well, and few consequences for doing it poorly. Often the problem arises only after something goes wrong and data are lost.

Problematically, universities have not seen data management as a responsibility nor something for which they need to provide services. As a direct result of this survey University of Queensland has put data management/loss into their overall risk strategy. Belinda believes a risk management approach is a powerful way to influence institutional senior management to support proper data management.

As we were sipping our coffee, Christiaan Kortekaas was walking by, and Belinda waved him over. Christiaan is the inventor of the Fez open source interface to the Fedora repository software for the University of Queensland Library, which is a competent rival to proprietary solutions. It's quite flexible, and can offer different metadata schemas (e.g. MODS, Dublin Core, etc.) and a variety of classification schemes.

As for libraries, Belinda saw multiple roles (her secondment replacements are pursuing this now). Although data management support is often in no one's job description, it is commonly repository managers who fill this void - perhaps due to the rallying encouragement of APSR, the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories. Specifically, librarians could provide support in describing data structures (metadata & documentation), providing training and templates for data management; writing data rescue case studies; and exit plans for data producers leaving university. Whereas research offices tend to focus on new grants and fostering collaboration, and IT services on servers and cost recovery, libraries are in a unique position to help researchers in finding relevant tools and technology (Web 2.0, etc.) to enhance their research - just as they help them find publications literature. She even thinks that librarians should be based with faculty rather than all in the library building itself, so they can be part of the team. This has worked well, for example in the hospital, where librarians work alongside clinical researchers.

Belinda emphasised that researchers are not necessarily aware that librarians 'know stuff' about tools and technologies, so advocacy is needed. Her publicity poster urges staff and students to "join the growing number of UQ academics and researchers" who are preserving their digital research material with UQ eSpace. Smiling faces of people provide an 'imagine' scenario about materials they can deposit and the implicit benefits of doing so, making sharing research output seem the most natural thing in the world.

Here's a wee gem from Belinda: because repositories are a new service, people don't realise the huge potential. If researchers think they don't need libraries, then adding value to the research chain is vital. So: libraries should be re-purposing themselves around repositories.

Data Walkabout 5: Brisbane, QUT

I was very pleased that Paula Callan, e-Research Access Coordinator at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was available to meet me next (pictured with me). I have met Paula twice before: at Edinburgh on a study visit of her own and at the OAI5 conference at CERN in 2007, so I know she is switched on to both repositories and data management issues. QUT EPrints has been running for five years, and over 1500 academics are regular self-depositors. Paula was responsible for much of this success, though QUT had a huge advantage that Professor Tom Cochrane, an Open Access advocate, pushed through the institutional repository and supported it from the top as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning Support).

Each time I meet Paula she fills me in on Australian developments, such as the now-completed Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) project which coordinated the efforts of Australian institutional repositories; the Australian ResearCH Enabling enviRonment (ARCHER) and its open source toolset; Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) which features a data storage service to provide a national 'data fabric'; Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) - an online registry of Australian research collections, and the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. This last one is key to institutional responsibility for research data management because compliance is mandatory to receive research funding. It states that institutions are not only responsible for providing "safe and secure" storage facilities for data, but that there must be a policy on retention, ownership, and access to that data at an institutional level.

Another driver for Australian institutions is the Australian Research Council Funding Agreement which, for certain research grants, requires that research outputs - including both data and publications - be lodged in an institutional or disciplinary repository within 6 months of completion.

I learned more from Carolyn Young, Associate Director, Library Services (Information Resources) who kindly made time to speak with me before my talk to Library and eResearch support staff on DataShare and the Data Audit Framework projects. She and Joe Young, Manager of High Performance Computing, developed the Research Support Plan to comply with the government policies above, e.g. how to implement them, and how to enhance support services for research and data management.

Included in the plan are: a research data management policy; templates for funded research data management plans; a training programme for researchers; an organisational model that utilises staff efficiently for new services, and a data store for all departments (not just the heavy data users). They're looking inwards, i.e. at the OAK Law Project that has data expertise to contribute, and outwards, for example Monash University Library's Research Support Plan. They plan to contribute to the ORCA data registry and help to seed the ANDS Data Commons. Paula also introduced me to Joe's colleague Lance Divine, who told me about technology they use to help research projects visualise and manage their data, such as Mediaflux and plone.

Speaking of the OAK Law Project (Open Access to Knowledge) I met with Kylie Pappalardo, who explained the cutting edge work they do with open data and the Australian Creative Commons. We had an interesting discussion about whether open data should be licensed via the Creative Commons attribution-only license (OAK Law's opinion), or dedicated to the public domain only to avoid attribution stacking and other barriers to re-use (a view held by John Wilbanks of Science Commons). Since coming back to Britain I see that Rufus Pollock from the UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation has weighed in on this debate.

Kylie sent me away with a copy of their Practical Data Management: A Legal and Policy Guide, a useful resource although it is based on Australian law and practice. For example, in Australia the quintessential 'telephone book case' was settled in favour of the data collector so data can have copyright (because effort matters, just like creativity - not the decision in USA). But of course Britain has the Database Directive outside copyright law, so here too there is potential for IPR in data, though this has not been tested much in court.

See Data Walkabout (1) for further context about this post.

Data Walkabout 4: Sydney

I knew two people in Sydney who had come to Edinburgh on study visits in 2008: Maude Frances, Project Manager from University of New South Wales (UNSW) Library and Rowan Brownlee, Digital Project Analyst, University of Sydney Library. Now I know a bunch more, thanks to Maude and Rowan organising and publicising a super day of data management-related talks and meetings at the University of Sydney on 14 January, as part of my Data Walkabout.

Almost as a dress rehearsal, Maude invited me to give a version of my presentation to a smaller group at UNSW the day before "comprising academic staff, IT people, library staff, records and archive management people and research management people." In short, all the types of people needed to come together to form policy and services for institutional data management support. I was to provide an overview of the DISC-UK DataShare project and research data management policies and practices at the University of Edinburgh, including the Data Audit Framework Implementation project.

This was followed by a pleasant lunch (the first of several in university cafes set in bright glass-enclosed courtyards, often with birds walking around picking up scraps) with Maude, her manager (Digital Library Innovations and Development Unit) Tom Ruthven, Shane Cox, a researcher,who approached the Library for assistance and is now collaborating with Maude's team on the MeMRe project (Membrane Material Research) and the University Librarian, Andrew Wells. Andrew raised a poignant question that stuck with me throughout the rest of the visits: why would the Library get involved in support for research data management unless the researcher was willing to share their data? The question implied there was a difference in motivation for librarians getting involved in data mgmt support vs others, such as IT support staff. What is their motivation then? Often, it seems, cost recovery itself. After all, research is messy business, data is messy (as the data audits more than proved) and there is an understandable reluctance to don the burden and cost of cleaning it up for researchers or future users.

Nevertheless, Maude (who has been a researcher herself in the field of HIV prevention and got involved with the Library through the ARROW project) and her team are exemplary for braving into the waters and partnering directly with researchers who need information technology to get their research done. Maude sees a role for the Library particularly in enabling cross-disciplinary research, and in helping to align research, policy and practice. Another exemplary innovation at UNSW is the introduction of a promotional team (outreach librarians, if you will) for each faculty to promote use of the repository.

The seminar at U Sydney was attended by about 50 people "from various institutions, most of whom will be currently working in the area or have a strong interest in it" as Maude explained, meaning data management for "eResearch" which has quite a broad scope in Australia, possibly involving anything digital I think. Before the tea break we were welcomed and heard from a rapid fire succession of 10 minute presentations on ANDS (Australian National Data Service); Intersect, a new organisation to promote collaboration amongst Libraries and IT services in universities in New South Wales; and innovations at the University of Technology Sydney; UNSW Library (Maude and Shane); University of Sydney Library (Rowan); and the School of Chemistry's DataMINX. After, I was given quite a generous slot with plenty of time for discussion before lunch was served. I felt like I sobered up the previously optimistic mood with my slide of barriers to data sharing, so I didn't use it again on this trip. And I realised I needed a koala for my "data librarians are warm fuzzy creatures in the landscape" slide, which I rectified before my next presentation, with the help of Flickr (and Creative Commons). [Eventually I did take pictures of koalas sleeping in eucalyptus trees but their eyes were shut, which would not send the right message!]

Some of the challenging questions which the panel somehow managed to answer included Who is going to make persistent IDs persistent after ANDS is no longer funded? (maybe the national library, but they feel like everyone fingers them), and Who will manage ontologies and the mappings between them for the long-term for researchers to understand each other's data? (depends on whether there's an ongoing demand, likely), and Do mandates work? (need to take an educational approach, or in a word, No). I'll not forget soon the closing remarks of John Shipp, University Librarian, who welcomed those who'd gathered from across the state to "the oldest - and best - university in Australia" and quipped that he admitted he'd been expecting a Scot, and had to adjust his ears for listening to an American instead.

I was very pleased to meet Margaret Henty there, because Canberra had fallen off my itinerary and so I never made it to ANU. She was the lead author of the report on Investigating Data Management Practices in Australian Universities published by APSR (the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories) last summer - no winter! (July) - amongst other things, and now works for ANDS. I was invited to join a meeting after lunch with Margaret, Rowan, Jim Richardson (ICT relationship manager for eResearch, U Sydney), and Clare Sloggett (Intersect) who are planning a symposium on Supporting the Data Lifecycle for February. This is when I first realised that in Australia the 'repository people' and the 'eResearch people' actually meaningfully talk to each other. Another realisation, after consuming my parting gift from the U Sydney Library later, was that the Wirra Wirra winery label is worth watching out for.

Data Walkabout: Wellington

The second stop on my data walkabout was New Zealand's capital. I spent the morning with the Information Management team at Statistics New Zealand learning how they take initiative on documenting and archiving legacy datasets for long-term preservation. I'd heard Euan Cochrane's clever presentation at last year's IASSIST conference, and so I knew Stats NZ is unusual as a national statistical agency for adopting the XML-based DDI standard (Data Documentation Iniative).

I had previously only heard of DDI being used as a dissemination tool before, as within the software invented by the national data archive community, Nesstar, which allows the user to select cases and variables and do basic online analysis before downloading the entire dataset. So I was surprised to hear that while the team marks up datasets in DDI (ver 2), using an XML editor such as Stylus Studio, they don't disseminate them that way, but simply store them, basically in a dark archive which a handful of people have access to, for posterity.

As for dissemination, survey tables and other aggregate datasets are published on the website. For individual-level microdata, there are three ways to obtain them: a personal visit to the secure Data Lab, by requesting and obtaining a "CURF" - Confidentialised Unit Record File, or via Remote Access through ATOM (Access to Microdata). Access is restricted, reviewed on a per request basis, and all involve a cost recovery charge. Individual data on New Zealanders, it is felt, must be carefully guarded since the population is so small and people have unique attributes to which they could be identified.

A newly formed team,led by Hamish James, who along with Euan ensured my visit was hospitable and informative, has a mission of maintaining an enduring national statistical resource. Passage of time has proven that a) data are meaningless without metadata, and b) that there is reluctance from business units to part with data even to an organisational data archive. So the team is working hard to build trust with statisticians who collect and analyse data through effective preservation of legacy datasets. Eventually, workflows adopted by statisticians will ensure that newer data are properly documented and cared for from the start, hopefully making the archiving process easier.

The team collaborates with other preservation organisations in the city, Archives New Zealand and the National Library, who all meet regularly to exchange best practice. They use tools such as JHOVE (to produce checksums for checking data integrity), DROID, which provides a PRONOM identifier that gives a full description of the file format, and the National Library of NZ Metadata Harvester, which produces an XML file from which an XSLT stylesheet is produced. A local script then helps to fill in a PREMIS preservation metadata record.

In the afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting with Isabella Cawthorne and Julia Watson from the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) over coffee near the Beehive Parliament building (pictured). Isabella, as a policy-maker for research funding, is concerned about incentivising researchers to manage and share data to avoid having to fund projects that "reinventing the wheel". She says New Zealand needs coordination to get the best value out of environmental research. Julia is working on the e-Research front: the high speed Karen network has been set up in New Zealand, but applications and middleware still needs to be developed. They both believe BESTGrid is a good "bottom-up" example that could be an exemplar for further collaboration and development.

Their ideal scenario for environmental data sharing is a federated approach (rather than a central archive), but with authenticated access, based on levels of quality assured data. (New Zealand is considering joining the Australian Access Federation, which would offer a Shibboleth-based approach to authentication.) They shared a discussion paper commissioned by MORST called Environment Data 2.0: building the digital platform for a sustainable future, which sets out this vision.

I found this substantial food for thought: what can policy makers and funders put in place to best encourage data sharing in research?

Data Walkabout: University of Auckland

The first stop on the data walkabout was not Australia - but Auckland, New Zealand. The wonderful Leonie Hayes, Research Repository Librarian at University of Auckland was my host on 5 January: at the start of their summertime. I first met her at Open Repositories 2008 (Southampton), also she came for a study visit to Edinburgh near the same time. The University Libraries of Auckland and Edinburgh have a connection going back years, as they both use DSpace software for their repositories. Both Janet Copsey, the University Librarian, and Brian Flaherty, the IT manager, have visited Edinburgh. They graciously returned the hospitality to an Edinburgher and Brian invited others to come over in the future. (Simon and Morag - you were particularly named!)

Leonie organised a nicely rounded day including a tour of the library and Learning Centre (summer school was beginning), meetings with the abovementioned plus John Garraway - Digital Services Manager,
and Chris Wilson – Associate University Librarian Access Services, as well as a teleconference to discuss data management plans with others. Prof. Mark Gahegan, an academic, had been invited, but someone was bound to be on holiday. He does, incidentally, have the most interesting and fanciful biography on his home page that I ever did see. http://www.sges.auckland.ac.nz/the_school/our_people/gahegan_mark/index.shtm

After a nourishing working lunch, Brian gave an overview of BestGRID and the New Zealand Social Science Data Service. BestGRID is funded by the Tertiary Education Commission to work with the KAREN infrastructure (think bandwidth infrastructure) to develop collaboration tools, a computational grid, and a data grid. They successfully use AccessGrid for Universities and the Crown Research Institutes to collaborate, as well as ERO - a desktop version of a videoconferencing tool. Sakai has proven useful as a research collaboration tool - probably more so than for e-learning. They 'shibbolised' the computational grid, and are considering both a crosswalk for discipline-specific application ontologies, and a library role for metadata registries of middleware in future development. The data grid hosts large amounts of distributed data; examples include an earthquake project, an Austronesian language database and a gene microarray facility.

The NZ Social Science Data Service is a collection of election and health surveys marked up in DDI and delivered online via Nesstar, with authenticated access, but as we discussed, not a lot of data is available in New Zealand for free at the point of use, and everyone is thinking of cost recovery for data distribution. Janet is leading the Kiwi Research Information Service (similiar to Australian ARROW, with a focus on theses into digital repositories) which may be able to influence government agencies to omit longstanding charging mechanisms for academic use of data. The data service has a history involving the New Zealand Social Statistics Network with some initial assistance from the Australian Social Science Data Archive (ASSDA) at the Australia National University. The data service faces a possibly precarious future yet it is hoped by the PI that the Library at Auckland will be keen to take over stewardship. There is some interest in hiring a data librarian there.

In the teleconference, we heard from Barbara Taylor at University of Otago, who has an interest in data management not just from the Library, but for the University more generally; and Isabella Cawthorne from MORST, a central government department interested in finding ways to incentivise researchers to do better data management as part of research funding; and Gillian Eliot at Otago, who recently completed a survey of 75 researchers. She found out they were not hostile to improving data management practices, but cited lack of time and support, which could indicate a library role. We discussed the Lessons Learned documents from the Data Audit Framework projects in the UK, and whether institutions need to be bold in developing data policies and asserting their ownership of data collected by staff. It was agreed academics are concerned about tough competition for funding and yet that data management not take away from capacity to do research itself.

John Garraway introduced an interesting musing of whether the Public Records Act could be used to push academics in the direction of sharing. Suddenly it occurred to me all our painstaking Data Audit Framework interviews and inventories might have been in vain and we could have simply filed a Freedom of Information Request to our own university! (Or maybe not.)

Data Walkabout (1)

What’s a librarian from Scotland with data on her mind doing on a walkabout around Australia? Visiting universities in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, as well as New Zealand.

So far my suspicion that there’s a lot of interest and action in Australian academic libraries to gear up for supporting data management seems to be well-founded. As well as receiving great hospitality I am hearing much interest in our DataShare and Data Audit Framework projects. I’m learning ‘heaps’ more about what Australian universities are planning and beginning to provide as new services and models, e.g. through ANDS, the Australian National Data Service, but also regional collaborations between universities, libraries, and research teams.

And I’m discovering that Edinburgh, Scotland might not be the windiest place on earth after all.

Having just celebrated Edinburgh University Data Library’s 25th anniversary at the end of last year, I was reminded that the EDINA and Data Library’s director, Peter Burnhill, went on a similar travel mission in the early days of the founding of the service to visit and report back on data libraries in North America. With strategy on my mind, and a transition from project to service for the Edinburgh DataShare repository coming up, this is a key time to consider how changes in technology, user needs and the broader academic ‘landscape’ do and should affect the services we offer. Like libraries more generally, data libraries need to adapt to a paradigm shift from information scarcity to information abundance.

I’ll be reporting some observations from my meetings ‘down under’ in this blog over the next couple weeks.

Data Walkabout 2: Auckland

Data Walkabout 3: Wellington

Data Walkabout 4: Sydney

Data Walkabout 5: Brisbane, QUT

Data Walkabout 6: Brisbane, University of Queensland

Data Walkabout 7: Melbourne