This is a starter blog entry for people to share their thoughts and reflections about the conference as we go along and afterwards. Just Add a comment to this post and blog away! If you would like to be a regular blog contributor, talk to San Cannon, the IASSIST Communique editor.
So now that I remember my blog password, I have lots to say. I want to extend my congratulations and kudos to my fellow session participants in C3 (New Discovery Tools: Thinking Outside the Catalogue) where we managed to kill 3 laptops and still do 4 outstanding presentations. The room was too hot and too crowded but the attendees were patient, enthusiastic and even provided some tech support!! Paul Bern was the lucky presenter - the laptop didn’t reallly crash until he was done explaining how to make Google work better for us and help us to help other folks find data.
An overriding theme of the A1 session, Self-Archiving or Self Storage, was empowering data producers to participate in creating and providing metadata for their materials. Another way to describe it: involving researchers in these processes by meeting them where they’re at with the most flexible tools possible. I must also mention that this was an extremely popular session, drawing a standing-room-only crowd. So this roving blogger found a comfy seat in the back of the room on the floor, next to the fake potted palm.
The conference is on and I’m hoping to see lots of blog entries from the interesting sessions today. I’m expecting some details on session A1 from another contributor but…. I’ve been asked by Kristin Partlo to pass along the proposals she and Rachael Barlow outlined at the end of their presentation for further comment. So here they are! This part of the session was on social bookmarking using sites such as del.
Bill Hooker has written a nice article about ensuring that the data behind published scientific literature are made openly available. Where are the data? Can I have them? What can I do with them? (17 Dec, 2006). He takes a practical approach based on the perspective of a researcher. His title says it all. …an Open Data addendum must at least answer my opening questions: it must point to the online, freely accessible location of the raw, un-hamburgered data; it should make clear that yes, you can have them; and it should state clearly what you can do with them.
The conference theme for IASSIST 2007, Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data, is very timely given new interest in defining and describing the open data concept. This week Peter Murray-Rust, who spearheads the SPARC-Opendata discussion list, posted a message announcing his entry for Open Data in the Wikipedia and inviting others to contribute to this entry. Robin Rice responded to Peter’s message with a copy of the IASSIST call for papers, which resulted in the following obervation from Peter: “Many of [the topics in the call for papers] have a close overlap with the topics at the Science Commons meeting and it is clear that Open Data is likely to become more widely used.
Google has announced a new service, that might make it possible for the data community to collaborate to build a customized data-finder. The service is the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Similar in some ways to Rollyo, a service that has been around for some time, the Google CSE has several nice features: Limit results of a Google search to specific sites. Exclude sites from search results. Collaborate on the selection of the sites to search and exclude Customize the search results page Add “refinements” that make it easy for users to refine search results Eliminate Google ads if hosted by a university, government agency, or non-profit There is a story about the service on eWeek: Google Copies Rollyo’s Business Plan, Inserts AdSense (October 24, 2006 4:01 AM) by Steve Bryant.
Shawn Nicholson pointed out on the IASSIST list: “As a follow on to the talk we heard in Ann Arbor, this set of PowerPoint presentations might be of interest: http://www.arl.org/info/events/ncr” NSF Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe
Luis Martinez, IASSIST member and Data Librarian at the London School of Economics, has begun an entry on Wikipedia on the topic “Data Library”. Luis welcomes this community’s help in fleshing it out and providing more context. For those who have never been involved with Wikipedia, the editors come round and add comments, and often seem to judge the importance of an entry based on the number of people involved with ‘curating’ it.
Intute was launched on 13 July 2006 at an event held at the Wellcome Trust, London. Intute is the new face of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and is a free national service enabling lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access quality Internet resources. Intute exists to advance education and research by promoting the most intelligent use of the Internet. Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute said, “the environment in which we operate is rapidly changing.
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