EDINA newsline
December 2007: Volume 12 Issue 4
Academic research datasets have special requirements for storing and sharing. The DISC-UK DataShare project, coordinated by EDINA, seeks to help Institutional Repositories (IR) in UK higher education meet these requirements. (DISC-UK is the Data Information Specialists Committee-United Kingdom.) The project builds on the existing informal collaboration of DISC-UK members for improving their data libraries and models of social science data support.
The DataShare project will bring academic data librarians in closer contact with IR managers, fostering new forms of co-operation between these distinct groups of information professionals. It will identify training needs for both groups, particularly librarians unfamiliar with support of research data. Based on a distributed model, the DataShare participants at four institutions (Edinburgh, London School of Economics, Oxford, and Southampton) are each responsible for the work on their own repositories; but their experience, support and knowledge are shared in order to increase levels of success. This network of institution-based data repositories develops a model for deposit of ‘orphaned datasets’, currently catered for neither by centralised subject-domain data archives/centres/grids nor by e-print based IRs.
The advantage for the broader community is to provide exemplars for a range of approaches dealing with datasets in IRs. These exemplars will be demonstrated using the three main open-source repository solutions: e-prints, DSpace and Fedora.
Policy and scoping documents, depositor agreement forms, preservation planning, software code and templates for institutional data audits will all be shared with the community.
EDINA is co-ordinating the project as a whole, drawing on its relevant experience from Jorum (repository of learning objects), GRADE (repository for geo-spatial data) and the Depot (filling in the gaps of IR provision for e-prints).