Margaret Hedstrom

Digital Preservation: A Time Bomb for Digital Libraries.

The difficulty and expense of preserving digital information is a potential impediment to digital library development. Preservation of traditional materials became more successful and systematic after libraries and archives integrated preservation into overall planning and resource allocation. Digital preservation is largely experimental and replete with the risks associated with untested methods. Digital preservation strategies are shaped by the needs and constraints of repositories with little consideration for the requirements of current and future users of digital scholarly resources. This article discusses the present state of digital preservation, articulates requirements of both users and custodians, and suggests research needs in storage media, migration, conversion, and overall management strategies. Additional research in these areas would help developers of digital libraries and other institutions with preservation responsibilities to integrate long-term preservation into program planning, administration, system architectures, and resource allocation.

Ten Simple Rules for the Care and Feeding of Scientific Data

In the early 1600s, Galileo Galilei turned a telescope toward Jupiter. In his log book each night, he drew to-scale schematic diagrams of Jupiter and some oddly moving points of light near it. Galileo labeled each drawing with the date. Eventually he used his observations to conclude that the Earth orbits the Sun, just as the four Galilean moons orbit Jupiter. History shows Galileo to be much more than an astronomical hero, though. His clear and careful record keeping and publication style not only let Galileo understand the solar system, they continue to let anyone understand how Galileo did it. Galileos notes directly integrated his data (drawings of Jupiter and its moons), key metadata (timing of each observation, weather, and telescope properties), and text (descriptions of methods, analysis, and conclusions). Critically, when Galileo included the information from those notes in Sidereus Nuncius, this integration of text, data, and metadata was preserved, as shown in Figure 1. Galileos work advanced the “Scientific Revolution,” and his approach to observation and analysis contributed significantly to the shaping of todays modern “scientific method”.

Preservation research and sustainable digital libraries

The National Science Foundation and DELOS , the European Commission sponsored Network for Digital Libraries, supported a working group to define a research agenda for digital archiving and preservation (DAP-WG) within the context of digital libraries. The report of this group, Invest to Save, has laid out a range of research challenges that need to be addressed if we are to make progress in the development of sustainable digital libraries. DAP-WG considered archiving and preservation needs and the research that had been conducted to address these. It concluded that research in this domain could benefit from being expanded and refocused—new research communities must be engaged, the approaches to conducting the research must be made more rigorous, and a significant shift in what was being researched needed to be taken. The Group identified twenty-two key research activities worthy of investigation.

Documentation evaluation model for social science data

Information technology and data sharing policies have made more and more social science data available for secondary analysis. In secondary data analysis, documentation plays a critical role in transferring knowledge about data from data producers to secondary users. Despite its importance, documentation of social science data has rarely been the focus of existing studies. In this paper, based on an introduction of the concept of documentation and its role in secondary data analysis, the authors proposed the Documentation Evaluation Model(DEM) for social science data. In the model, two indicators are used to evaluate the documentation for social science data: sufficiency and ease-of-use. Then the authors review the sufficiency problems of documentation, identify three factors that affect the sufficiency of documentation: users, data, and the ease-of-use of documentation, and formulate hypotheses about how those factors affect the sufficiency of documentation. In future research, a survey instrument will be created based on the model and the factors affecting the sufficiency of documentation. The survey instrument will then be applied to the secondary users of social science data. Hypotheses will be tested based on the survey data.

And the last shall be first: recordkeeping policies and the NII

The lack of attention to recordkeeping issues in NII activities is not surprising given that recordkeeping is neither a generic activity nor an end in itself which can be evaluated apart form the objectives of a broad range of NII-related applications. A fruitful understanding of the role and value of record-keeping for the NII can be derived from understanding model recordkeeping policies and how they might be integrated into the specific needs and requirements of particular application areas

Research Issues in Migration and Long-Term Preservation

Long-term preservation and migration are concerns not only of the recordkeeping community, but also of other professions and institutions with stewardship or custodial responsibilities for information assets. Unanswered problems with preservation and access to information over time, including records in the archival sense, are acknowledged as a limitation to the development of digital libraries, electronic archives, electronic patient records, legal documentation, scientific databases, and administrative support systems. Properly framed research questions could draw support from a variety of sources to address the conceptual, process, and technical aspects of long-term preservation using multi-disciplinary methods and expertise. In 1996, a task force commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group issued a report on preserving digital information.1 Although the report has stimulated considerable discussion and follow-on activities in the library community and among preservationists, experts in electronic records management have been critical of the report’s conceptual basis and recommendations.2 As a member of the Task Force, I was an active contributor

How research funding affects data sharing

In order to encourage interdisciplinary research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are mandating that researchers make their data public in an effort to provide incentives for data sharing. While this has encouraged data sharing in some fields, other fields with little NSF or NIH funding do not have the same incentives to encourage such sharing. In this work, we find that these other funding sources either fail to encourage data sharing and in some cases actively discourage it.

The SEAD DataNet prototype: data preservation services for sustainability science

In this poster we will present the SEAD project [1] and its prototype software and describe how SEAD approaches long-term data preservation and access through multiple partnerships and how it supports sustainability science researchers in their data management, analysis and archival needs. SEADs initial prototype system currently is being tested by ingesting datasets from the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (1.6 terabyte of data containing over 450,000 files) [2] and packaging them for transmission to long-term archival storage.

Macro and micro pressures in data sharing

Despite predicted benefits of data integration in the sciences, many factors continue to limit data sharing. In this paper we argue that data practices of individual researchers represent a key bottleneck. Through an interview study across multiple fields, we show that data practices vary as a function of norms learned from senior mentors, where data sharing is more likely when supported and modeled by a lab director. Further, through an analysis of deposits to a data repository, we show that data practices are sensitive to global events, where data sharing is more likely in the face of an emergency or crisis. These results suggest that current strategies to achieve data integration, such as policy directives from federal agencies, are poorly aligned with incentives that matter to scientists. We conclude with a summary of influences that are more likely to shape data practices in the direction of greater data sharing.

Introduction to 2020 Vision

About the author: Margaret Hedstrom is chief public records analyst at the New York State Archives and Records Administration and director of its Center for Electronic Records. She was chair of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Committee on Automated Records and Techniques (1988-90) and wrote the SAA manual on machine-readable records (1984). She is a fellow of the SAA and currently serves on Council.