Data Management

Meet the Inaugural DRS Pilot Projects

 
The Library’s Digital Scholarship Group is excited to announce projects chosen for the 2015 DRS Project Toolkit Pilot program. In this Pilot program, we work with selected digital projects at Northeastern to develop new tools for online scholarship. Projects will store and preserve their digital content in Northeastern’s next generation Digital Repository Service (learn more about the DRS here). Projects can then use platforms like WordPress and Omeka to curate and display this work in an engaging and accessible manner on the web. The Digital Scholarship Group received impressive proposals from a wide range of Northeastern’s colleges and departments, and are looking forward to working with the following three proposals for 2015-2016:
  • Debra Mandel (Libraries) will showcase the exciting work Northeastern students have created in Snell Library’s Digital Media Commons and Studios. A collaborative facility with state-of-the-art audio and video technology and support, the Digital Media Commons has helped students at Northeastern record music, create animated films, and produce a range of high-quality creative projects. The Digital Scholarship Group will help Digital Media Commons staff celebrate and preserve this work.
  • Giordana Mecagni (Archives and Special Collections) will create digital exhibits about the Boston Public Schools Desegregation, a process which began in the fall of 1974. The Digital Scholarship Group will help Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections make digital records of this important event in the history of Boston more widely accessible and visible. In addition to Archives and Special Collections, an interdisciplinary coalition of students, faculty members, and archivists from the Northeastern community will participate in this project.
  • Jenny Sartori (Jewish Studies) and the University’s Holocaust Awareness Committee will create a publicly-accessible archive of Northeastern’s Holocaust Awareness Week programming. For more than thirty years, these events have reflected Northeastern’s commitment to Holocaust awareness and genocide prevention. This will be an important educational resource that highlights the digital records of survivor testimonies, distinguished lectures, and roundtable discussions, as well as the history of the Holocaust Awareness Committee itself.
These projects join three other new DSG initiatives from earlier in Spring 2015:
  • a web presence for content from the Library’s Arader Galleries collection (and the creation of new signage that directs viewers of the physical prints to this online collection)
  • the addition of Stephen Sadow’s collection of interviews with Latin American artists and writers to the DRS
  • the migration of the Catskill Institute materials from their current home at Brown University to the DRS (and a new website at Northeastern)
The Digital Scholarship Group also continues to support the ongoing work of the Women Writers Project; Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive; The Early Caribbean Digital Archive; Viral Texts; Digital Humanities Quarterly; and TAPAS. For more information on projects supported by the Digital Scholarship Group, please visit our Projects page. If you’d like to contact the Digital Scholarship Group, please email us: dsg@neu.edu. We are also on Twitter: @NU_DSG.

Meet Snell’s Newest Staff Member

Snell Library is gaining a new librarian: Daniel Jergovic has been appointed as a new Metadata Librarian in the Metadata Management department. Jergovic started his new job with Northeastern University Libraries on January 9th. As a metadata librarian, Jergovic creates access to the library’s resources, especially those that are electronic and digital. Jergovic says he is interested in this area because he enjoys “the challenges of organizing information” and “helping people find and use library resources”. Jergovic brings plenty of experience to his new position: before working at Northeastern, he was a librarian for five years, working at the University of South Florida, University of Washington, and San Diego State University. At San Diego State, he managed metadata and cataloging activities for multiple print and digital projects. Jergovic holds an MSIS from the State University of New York at Albany. In addition to his various positions as a librarian, Jergovic is also an active contributor to library committees and professional development associations, including the ALA ALCTS CaMMS Recruitment and Mentoring Committee and the Leadership Development Committee, where he serves as a communications liaison. Jergovic has just moved to Boston and loves living in the city so far. Originally from Cleveland, Jergovic has lived in several cities, including Seattle, San Diego, Tampa, and London. Jergovic says Boston is among his “most favorite places to live”. Jergovic is also fluent in Croatian and Serbian and has been an instructor at Berlitz International. When he’s not at the library, Jergovic has numerous hobbies that he likes to partake in, including movies, music, traveling, exercising, eating out at restaurants, and cooking, although he admits the latter is not his strongest skill. So far, Jergovic likes working at Northeastern and says he is “really impressed by the university,” especially its “strong orientation towards looking toward the future.” We at the library welcome Daniel to Northeastern University and wish him luck in his new position!

Data Management and Curation at Northeastern

Northeastern University Libraries is embarking on a program to help researchers at the University write data management plans in grant applications, help people store and create metadata for their research, and, eventually, help them publish their datasets with all the appropriate metadata to the appropriate audiences. What is the use of this? In a lot of ways, it is a way to make research more efficient, and thus, in the long run, cheaper. Researchers regularly create data from experiments and observations. In an academic environment, they then use that data to test hypotheses and generate new ideas. The results are published, and humanity gains new knowledge. (I realize that I’m simplifying the process considerably.) But what happens to the data that had been collected? The researchers that create it obviously use it for further inquiries, but much of the time, the data is stored somewhere and forgotten. People have been slowly realizing that there may be more knowledge that can be combed out of the “old” data. Perhaps it can be combined with data from another source, or multiple other sources, and new questions can be answered using it. In fact, funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, are starting to require that grant applications include a Data Management Plan, which should explain how the researchers on the grant will:
share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants.
I will be working with the staff at Northeastern University Libraries and the researchers at Northeastern to make sure that Northeastern can become a leader in data management and curation.