May 2008 Archives
This week, several of us are at the Sun PASIG SIG in San Francisco: Mark Saussure, Lynn Garrison and Ben Grissinger from DLT and Sue Kellerman, Head of Digitization and Preservation in the University Libraries. The agenda is here.
The CIC Librarians and e-Science conference was held Monday and Tuesday of this week at Purdue University and here's a quick report back.
The conference was attended by science librarians (majority), data librarians, library administrators, IT (central and library), and archivists and from what I could tell, one HPC/visualization expert - George Otto from Penn State.
There were essentially three types of presentations at the conference: overviews of exemplar projects by scientists/researchers; examples of how libraries are currently engaging in supporting such projects; and descriptions of new course offerings at a couple of Library Science schools to create data curators or data librarians.
In the first category projects discussed included the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Blue Waters computing project at NCSA, the Virtual Observatory projects at the US National Observatory, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. While the data generated in these projects is typically on an unprecedented scale, there was also discussion of small science needs and how they differ from big science; small science typically not using supercomputing capabilities (at least not yet), often informal and manual data collection and typically not funded by major federal funding agencies. However, small science data needs typically share a common characteristic with big science; the need to capture and retain data over extended time periods.
The Large Hadron Collider already has a well structured way of managing and distributing its data; what to keep locally, and what to distribute to regional and national nodes.
E-Science, as discussed at this conference, is characterized as collaborative (single or interdisciplinary), distributed (regionally, nationally, globally), using high performance supercomputing capabilities and generating large amounts of data. The question posed by Thom Dunning of NCSA was not just how science and engineering can benefit from the engagement of libraries in e-science, but how libraries might benefit from the data generated by petascale computing and its derivatives. While the need for curation of this data is being addressed to a small degree right now, the preservation, storage and archiving of the data is not. However, the NSF DataNet program is attempting to address that gap. (It was openly disclosed that several collaborations of CIC schools submitted proposals to this program but didn't make the final cut.)
Examples of how libraries are engaging in e-science/e-research included activities that support/foster traditional research such as VIVO from the Life Sciences library at Cornell, a database of researchers, their research interests, organizations, publications, etc. Purdue has created a Distributed Data Curation Center
to "investigate and pursue innovative solutions for curation issues of organizing, facilitating access to, archiving for and preserving research data and data sets in complex environments." We heard a very interesting case study of how the Agricultural Sciences librarian at Purdue worked with an agronomist there to support her data curation needs (this was clearly an example of "small science".) The University of Minnesota has created a Research Cyberinfrastructure Alliance which includes their library as well as supercomputing institute, and several academic departments: here's a project update at the recent CNI meeting on this effort.
Neil Rambo of the Association of Research Libraries characterized the areas for library engagement in e-science as data curation, new forms of publications, virtual organizations and policy development and said that this will likely require organizational restructuring of libraries, as well as requiring a more balanced "risk averse vs. risk capable" approach.
Other common themes across the presentations:
- Need for continuing education and new course offerings in Library Science and I-Schools;
- The value of collaboration in the "grey area" between Libraries and central IT;
- The value of domain experts (aka subject specialists);
- Engagement further upstream in scholarly communications and publication lifecycle (at creation or authoring rather than focusing on the publication stage for the most part);
- Scientists/researchers often don't know or understand what librarians do;
- Look for ways to "embed" the data librarian or librarian in the research activity (this is likely to be more successful if that librarian is a domain expert);
- The skills need to manage e-science data are not new to Libraries but the concept of libraries integrating "raw data" sets into its holdings is;
- The Semantic Web offers hope for the management of data and its integration with other resources;
- What will it mean for science if data goes away? How do we decide what data to keep?
- Scientists don't always want to share data; various reasons for this including research competitiveness, and data that's too raw and not easily interpreted or open to misinterpretation.
In break out sessions at the end of the conference, we discussed what role the CIC might play in fostering collaborations between research libraries and the e-science community. One question raised was to consider what it would take for CIC schools to be competitive in the NSF DataNet funding program. Also, how about a conference for scientists, librarians and IT?
Cliff Lynch at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) sent this announcement out on the CNI list this morning. Looks like a very interesting report.
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Interim Report
Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=300
Principal Investigator Diane Harley, Ph.D., Senior Researcher
Research Associates: Sarah Earl-Novell, Ph.D., Sophia Krzys Acord, Shannon Lawrence, Principal Investigator C. Judson King, Professor, Provost Emeritus and Director
ABSTRACT:
The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses on fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.
Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived “opportunities” afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by “open access” publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for work published in prestigious outlets, versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our work suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments.
For more information about the research project see the Future of Scholarly Communication website: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication/
Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=300
Principal Investigator Diane Harley, Ph.D., Senior Researcher
Research Associates: Sarah Earl-Novell, Ph.D., Sophia Krzys Acord, Shannon Lawrence, Principal Investigator C. Judson King, Professor, Provost Emeritus and Director
ABSTRACT:
The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses on fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.
Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived “opportunities” afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by “open access” publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for work published in prestigious outlets, versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our work suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments.
For more information about the research project see the Future of Scholarly Communication website: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication/
The CIC is holding a two day conference at Purdue May 12 -13 on "Librarians & e-Science: Focusing towards 20/20". The agenda is available here. Lisa German, John Meier, Bonnie Osif, and Linda Musser are attending from University Libraries while George Otto and I are attending from ITS. Blog reporting will follow.
