data management

Learn to Write a Data Management Plan, Find Out What Social Media Knows About You, and More

"You Are Here" artwork by Mario Klingemann

How does your commute make you feel? Map it! What does Facebook know about you? Download your data! What do you need to say about your data in a grant proposal? Learn about data management plans!

We’re hosting a few events this month to coincide with Love Data Week and Endangered Data Week, and you’re invited to:

Check out the full lineup and register for your spot: bit.ly/snelldata19

“You Are Here” by Mario Klingemann on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Open Access Week: October 24-30, 2011

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fifth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. Open access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole. During the week of October 24-30, the Northeastern University Libraries will host a series of events to celebrate Open Access. The events will cover a range of topics:
  • open collaboration in the sciences
  • the effects of Wikipedia and social networking on student research
  • open access works by Northeastern faculty
  • free and open college textbooks
  • data gathering and storage needs of grad students
⇒ Click here to view the full schedule of events for Open Access Week. The Library has supported Open Access in the Northeastern community since 2006 in the form of the University’s digital archive, IRis. The goal of IRis is to collect, manage, preserve, and share the intellectual output and historical record of Northeastern University. IRis provides open access to NU researchers who want to promote and preserve their materials, to NU students who require digital storage and promotion of their dissertations and theses, to NU administrators who need to save important university records, and to anyone who is seeking information on the intellectual productivity of the Northeastern community. Since its start, IRis has expanded to hold 531 faculty publications and approximately 600 dissertations and master’s theses. And since January 1, 2010, there have been over 230,000 downloads of full-text items from IRis, which include scholarly content as well as university archival content. Building upon the success of IRis, the Library will soon offer a robust digital repository and preservation service to the campus for digital collections, images, media, and data, as well as accompanying metadata and consulting help.

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.

Open Access Week: Data Management and Sharing

OA Week Today I’m blogging from UMass Amherst, where I came to attend three events being held as part of Open Access Week. I just came from the second event, which was a focus group with grad students on their data management needs. Data management is of increasing interest on university campuses — researchers are generating more data than ever before, and while we’re able to store more information in smaller physical spaces, it still seems like a challenge to keep up with the demand for more space. What I learned from the students at this session is that different disciplines have their own ways of managing data, and methods for doing so might differ between grad students and their advisors within a single lab or research group. They want their data to be accessible from anywhere in the world, and many find their current arrangements for managing and sharing data to be unsatisfactory. (E-mailing data to themselves or each other or transferring data on USB sticks is common.) And yes — they want more! space! One grad student estimated that his lab produces multiple terabytes of data on a weekly basis. Students are also concerned about the NSF’s new requirement that a data management plan be included in grant applications. And they would love someone to come and consult with their departments on data management. Many of them would be happy to share their raw data with other researchers. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you have other, different concerns about your data? At Snell, we are very interested in talking with you and your research colleagues, whether you are students or faculty. Attending this focus group really emphasized to me that we need to begin reaching out to researchers on campus to learn what your needs are. Feel free to get in touch with me about your data management concerns!