Blogs

Scientific Data Repositories Issue Call for Change on Funding Models for Data Archives

For Immediate Release September 16, 2013 Contact: Mark Thompson-Kolar, 734-615-7904 mdmtk@umich.edu (Ann Arbor, MI) — Representatives of 25 organizations that archive scientific data today released a Call for Action urging the creation of sustainable funding streams for domain repositories — data archives with close ties to scientific communities. The document was developed after a meeting of data repositories across the social and natural sciences June 24-25, 2013, in Ann Arbor. The meeting was organized by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan and supported by the Alfred P.

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I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I’m just in the process of updating who we follow from our @iassistdata twitter account (we follow members who follow us - when I get round to updating things, sorry). Given the huge* number of followers we now have, (595, thank you one and all) I thought it would be interesting to see what we looked like according to our twitter bios. No surprises: we define ourselves as data people or organisations, in terms of “research”, “librarian” (and library related terms), “social” “science”, “digital”, “information”, and “universities”.

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Finding Historical Economic Data through FRASER and ALFRED

The North Carolina Library Association’s Government Resources Section had an excellent webinar yesterday on finding historical (or vintage) economic data using FRASER and ALFRED. The recording and slides are available to everyone. Enjoy!

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Sharing data: good for science, good for you

DANS has published a video to promote storing and sharing data within the research community. The video is available in Dutch and English, and shown on the DANS Youtube channel. The title of the English video is ‘Sharing data: good for science, good for you’:http://youtu.be/HJbo-OAaJ1I “Scientific research produces data. The lifetime of these data varies greatly. Stored on a hard disk or USB stick they are likely to be lost in the near future together with the storage medium.

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Congratulations to Dan Tsang and Wendy Watkins!

As some of you may know, Dan Tsang and Wendy Watkins have been named the 2013 ICSPR Flanagan Award winners for distinguished service as an ICPSR OR, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/support/announcements/2013/07/icpsr-announces-2013-warren-e-miller UC-Irvine recognizes Dan here, http://www.lib.uci.edu//features/spotlights/dt-award.html Perhaps a Canadian colleague has a similar link for Wendy. Congratulations to both Dan and Wendy!

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Managing and sharing data; best practice guide for researchers

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The Role of Data Repositories in Reproducible Research

Cross posted from ISPS Lux et Data Blog These questions were on my mind as I was preparing to present a poster at the Open Repositories 2013 conference in Charlottetown, PEI earlier this month. The annual conference brings the digital repositories community together with stakeholders, such as researchers, librarians, publishers and others to address issues pertaining to “the entire lifecycle of information.” The conference theme this year, “Use, Reuse, Reproduce,” could not have been more relevant to the ISPS Data Archive.

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OR2013: Open Repositories Confront Research Data

Open Repositories 2013 was hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island from July 8-12. A strong research data stream ran throughout this conference, which was attended by over 300 participants from around the globe. To my delight, many IASSISTers were in attendance, including the current IASSIST President and four Past-Presidents! Rarely do such sightings happen outside an IASSIST conference. IASSIST Five Presidents by Limor Peer This was my first Open Repositories conference and after the cool reception that research data received at the SPARC IR meetings in Baltimore a few years ago, I was unsure how data would be treated at this conference.

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DDI-XSLT -transform you DDI to XHTML, MARC, PDF

With DDI-XSLT you can tranform your DDI-lifeccle XML to other formats including: DDI 1.2.2 (nesstar) XHTML MARC-XML Datacite metadata PDF codebooks Demo site for transformations Google code page

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Ich bin ein IASSISTer

From 28-31 May, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences hosted the 39th Annual Conference of the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology, aka #iassist2013 IASSIST conferences provide an overview of what’s happening in information technology and data services and allow exchange of ideas between participants working in different backgrounds - from social science and humanities to information and computer science. The aim of this year’s event was to help us move closer to the dream of technical and organizational measures that make research data discoverable and accessible.

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