ICPSR Presentations at IASSIST
By ICPSR Staff
Join us at IASSIST 2021!
Our presentation details are listed below.
Additional information on the IASSIST conference site.
Scholarly Communication: ARL Libraries’ Investment in Research Data Infrastructure
A.J. Million (ICPSR), Heather Moulaison Sandy (University of Missouri), Cynthia Hudson-Vitale (Penn State University)
Monday, May 17, 2021
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PDT (4:00 PM – 5:00 PM EST)
The U.S. government awards half of all federal research dollars to university-affiliated researchers. Many of these researchers work for Association of Research Library (ARL) members; and increasingly, major research libraries support researchers throughout all stages of the research lifecycle. Using data and findings from two peer-reviewed studies, in this presentation, we describe how librarians in North America “designed” research support positions to assist academics and connect this process to ARL libraries’ investment in research data infrastructure.
Our presentation will be broken into four parts. First, we will use ARL survey data to demonstrate that member libraries hired 100+ scholarly communication librarians between 2012 and 2016. Second, using professional competencies documents from North America, we illustrate that librarians designed a new professional sub-field during this period with digital curation and research data management in mind. Third, we argue that when ARL libraries hired scholarly communication librarians, they committed to — and invested in — research data infrastructure. We define this infrastructure as a sociotechnical system. Fourth, we compare ARL’s approach to funding research data infrastructure against other models and discuss their long-term sustainability.
Integrating Self-publishing Platforms within Established Data Repositories
Chelsea Goforth, Jared Lyle, and Kyrani Reneau
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST)
Self-publishing platforms offer established repositories new channels for disseminating data collections. These new channels offer advantages like quicker distribution and minimal curatorial effort, but also pose potential disadvantages, such as lower quality descriptive metadata and incomplete documentation.
In this presentation, we discuss ICPSR’s experiences with its own self-publishing platform, openICPSR, which was first implemented in 2014. We detail the benefits, challenges, and opportunities of operating a self-publishing platform within an established data repository firmly committed to curating its collections. We especially delve into a discussion and examples of the potential tension between self-published and curated collections related to repository staff, users, development, and policies, including those surrounding content selection criteria and content moderation, preservation decisions, and disclosure risks.
Documenting Variable Comparability with DDI-Lifecycle
Kathryn Lavender and Sanda Ionescu
Thursday, May 20, 2021
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT (12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST)
ICPSR has recently been actively engaged in moving to DDI-Lifecycle to document some of its longitudinal data. Pilot projects involving the creation of DDI-L metadata for two of our most popular longitudinal studies have already been finalized, and the variable-level documentation for the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) is now publicly available for online searching and exploring comparability across waves.
Using this previous work as a background, we will focus our presentation on a new, ongoing project that uses DDI-Lifecycle to document comparability between two independent longitudinal collections – the NSHAP and the National Health and Aging Study (NHATS) – that explore similar topics, with special focus on health and cognition issues among aging populations.
We will elaborate on the steps, the tools we used, and the decisions taken to move this project forward, and will share practical details regarding its organization and progress. We will also include our findings regarding potential difficulties and benefits.
ICPSR Data Curation Levels
Annie Beaubien and Rujuta Umarji
Thursday, May 20, 2021
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM PDT (4:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST)
The goal of this presentation is to delve deeper into ICPSR’s data curation levels, an innovative approach to curating data designed to increase efficiency and consistency in today’s fast paced world. The curation levels were developed in 2018 to create a common data language across all of ICPSR’s projects, in terms of both data curation activities and timeframes. Results from the first year of the levels in practice were presented as a poster during IASSIST 2019 and were received with significant interest by the data curation community. This presentation will serve as a follow up of our lessons learned as we continue to refine curation levels. It will cover insights from both internal and external stakeholders, curation activities and how the levels have evolved over the past year, and their impact on workflow, timeframes, and data quality. A curator will co-present and provide insight on how the levels system works in day to day curation. ICPSR believes that this system has the potential to serve as a framework for other archives, and would like to begin a discussion about the use of curation levels in other settings.
