The University Library has a leading role in establishing standards, procedures and services to help researchers preserve their original data. We were therefore delighted to meet Robin Rice, who visited this month.

In a meeting with our Discipline Librarians in February, Robin shared some of her expertise in data sharing, data libraries and roles for librarians in providing data management services for researchers.

As the Data Librarian at the University of Edinburgh, Robin is the service manager for that university’s Data Library, a collection of information produced by Edinburgh scholars in the course of their research activities. Robin is also project manager of DISC-UK DataShare, a JISC-funded project to establish institutional data repositories at three UK universities.

Conducting university research often involves creating new data, processing it, analysing it and perhaps transforming it through visualisation or other methods. Modern technologies allow us to create enormous quantities of data and analysis . Once the research is completed and an article or other ‘finished’ output has been published, the original data needs to be preserved and possibly made available to other researchers in the future. Some data can be destroyed after just a few years; other information will be preserved indefinitely, just like other historical documents.

Whilst in Melbourne, Robin Rice spent most of her time at Monash University. Her presentation to the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) group is available as an MP3 (streaming or download) and presentation slides (PDF 1 Mb).

The New Media Literacies project at MIT takes what we might call an ‘embedded’ approach to teaching information literacy:

“How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in “age old” practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.”

At Harvard, the Good Play project:

“…seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world–especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation–and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.”

The two project teams met recently to share their experiences, and a summary was published on Henry Jenkins’ blog. Their blog post includes three examples of group exercises that help students work through concepts of responsibility, copyright and privacy.

The report also points to Spotlight, a group blog that publishes weekly articles about “what’s important” in the emerging field of digital media and learning.

The New Media Literacies project is building a ‘learning library’ and looking for partners, collaborators and contributors — see the NML web site for details.

Related posts on this Information Futures blog:

• Literacy, old and new
• Information management at a personal level
• Regardless of age, everyone googles

In an Ockham’s Razor talk on ABC Radio, Sydney-based science writer Peter Macinnis describes his own ‘fact fossicking’ behavior when researching material for a new book about Australian explorers:

“I wanted to look at the ways Australian explorers worked, to examine and describe what they took with them, how they used it, what they ate and drank, what medical treatments they used, and I knew this information was in the journals that all the explorers kept, and most of them published in the 1800s.

“I have a major gripe about the way new science gets into schools. Thomas Kuhn said it first but I have adopted it: new science textbooks are written by regurgitating old science textbooks, with little reference to new finds or ideas. Most scientific advances take 30 years or more to even be noted. As a textbook writer and general science writer, I’ve always tried to go back to source, even when that made me read research that caused my brain to hurt…

“Many of the gems that I gathered… were in libraries like Sydney’s Mitchell and Adelaide’s Barr Smith, but the bulk of my material came from one brilliant source, Project Gutenberg, and in particular, from the Australian arm of that organisation. Technology delivers what we need to get the full picture.

“I downloaded 5 million words of journals, all scanned, processed and proofed by volunteers. I culled to make a database of about 1 million words, 5-1/2-thousand selected passages, each linked to the explorer, a date, a source and a set of keyword codes. Explorers often called crocodiles alligators or caimans, and some used curious spelling as well. I needed the keyword codes if I was ever going to find the themes…

“Keeping it brief, I took text with line breaks, used word processor macros to format this into paragraphs, used other macros to add extra fields to my chosen passages, separated by tabs. I exported them to a spreadsheet, where more fields were added or calculated, to allow sorts and searches. Later, I used a spreadsheet to generate the Visual Basic code to convert my keyword codes to plain English, and then put that code into a word processor macro before exporting the translated codes back to the spreadsheet. I also used the spreadsheet to generate an HTML version, a full-on database and a word processor version.

“Then I could start writing…”

Library and computer science staff at the University of Minnesota have been thinking about how students create and manage a ‘personal reference library’ as they go about their scholarly work:

“Digital library users collect, enhance and manage their online reference collections to facilitate their research tasks. These personal collections, therefore, are likely to reflect users’ interests, and are representative of their profile. Understanding these collections offers great opportunities for developing personalized digital library services, such as reference recommender systems.” (Extract from “Resolvability of References in Users’ Personal Collections,” published in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, October 2007) (hat tip to Lorcan Dempsey)

 Amazon.com’s recommender system and Google’s AdWords advertisements use a similar approach. Automating the collection of data about user behavior is technologically straightforward; analysing the large quantities of data requires lots of computer power but again is relatively uncomplicated from a technical perspective.

University libraries already collect data about usage of collections and individual titles. The magic comes in asking the right questions about that information: of the people who read Book A, how many also look at Journal B? Does the content of Journal B have any similarities to that of Book A? Would the Book A readers benefit from being offered a ‘quicklink’ to Journal B?

Lorcan Dempsey observed in 2005 that, unlike Amazon.com and Google, university and public library systems “have low gravitational pull, they do not put the user in control, they do not adapt reflexively based on user behavior, they do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.”

The Minnesota study provides empirical evidence that investing in enhancements to library systems could provide substantial benefits to our students and academics.