All News Related to Carole L. Palmer


February 13
CIRSS Researchers at iConference 2012

CIRSS faculty, students and staff attended the 2012 iConference (http://www.ischools.org/iConference12/2012index/), an annual gathering information scholars, researchers and practitioners led by the iSchools consortium of information schools (http://www.ischools.org/site/about/).  The 2012 iConference took place in Toronto, Ontario, February 6-10 2012.

Workshops, presentations and posters by CIRSS researchers include:

 

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April 10
CIRSS Researchers at 2012 Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) Summit
CIRSS researchers presented two posters at the third annual annual ASIS&T Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) Summit (http://rdap12.posterous.com), held 22-23 March 2012 in New Orleans, LA.  Topics explored at this year's summit included data management plans and policies; training of data management practitioners; discovery of research data; data curation service models; sustainability of data management; and data curation.

The two posters report on CIRSS activities on the Data Conservancy project (http://dataconservancy.org), funded by NSF and led by partners at Johns Hopkins University.

What Dataset Descriptions Actually Describe: Using the Systematic Assertion Model to Connect Theory and Practice
Karen Wickett, Andrea Thomer, Simone Sacchi, Karen S. Baker, David Dubin
Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/30470

Scientific data is encoded and described with the aim of supporting retrieval, meaningful interpretation and reuse. Encoding standards for datasets like FGDC, DwC, EML typically include tagged metadata elements along with the encoded data, suggesting that, per the Dublin Core 1:1 principle, those elements apply to one and only one entity (a specimen, observation, dataset, etc.).  However, in practice vocabularies are often used to describe different dimensions of scientific data collection and communication processes. Discriminating these aspects offers a more precise account of how symbols and the propositions they express acquire the status of “data” and “data content,” respectively.

In this poster we present an analysis of species occurrence records based on the Systematic Assertion Model (SAM) [DWS]. SAM is a framework for describing the encoding and representation of scientific data, bridging the gap between data preservation models and discipline-specific scientific ontologies. The model is intended to be general enough for any scientific domain, and not bound to any particular methodology or field of study. Since species occurrence records are a kind of data that is frequent re-used, migrated across systems and shared they are a good target for analysis.

Integrating Conceptual and Empirical Studies of Data to Guide Curatorial Processes
Carole L. Palmer, Tiffany C. Chao, Nicholas M. Weber, Simone Sacchi, Karen M. Wickett, Allen H. Renear, Karen Baker, Andrea Thomer, & David Dubin

Two research teams within the Data Conservancy (http://dataconservancy.org/) project are investigating different aspects of scientific data curation. Data Concepts is developing a conceptual model to foster shared understanding of identity conditions and representation levels for data sets. Data Practices is conducting qualitative studies of data production and use in the earth and life sciences, analyzing curation needs, cultures of sharing, and re-use potential across disciplines. This poster will illustrate the integration of results from three phases of research to develop a more comprehensive and practical analysis of fundamental aspects of data curation.
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April 11
Interview with Carole Palmer on Big Data

GSLIS Professor and CIRSS Director Carole Palmer recently shared her thoughts in the University of Illinois feature, "A Minute With . . .," following the Obama administration's announcement of a $200 million research initiative in "big data" computing:

GSLIS has been at the forefront of data curation education since launching its specialization within the Master of Science degree in 2006, beginning with a focus on the sciences and expanding to include the humanities in 2008. Currently, more than 50 students enroll each year in the Foundations of Data Curation course, with many completing the GSLIS Specialization in Data Curation (http://www.lis.illinois.edu/academics/programs/ms/data_curation).
 
The interview with Professor Palmer was conducted by Dusty Rhodes, news editor for the U of I News Bureau.  Read the full interview at http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/62055.

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May 17
Palmer participates in NSF funded Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for Collaborative Science

 

Carole Palmer, Director of CIRSS, will participate in the Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for Collaborative Science, an NSF-funded workshop sponsored by and hosted at NESCent, May 18-20, 2011.

This workshop brings together participants with a diverse set of perspectives, background, and experiences on enabling multi-disciplinary research collaborations that often rely heavily on informatics to succeed. These include informatics practitioners, social scientists, technology experts, and biologists. The workshop provides an opportunity for these groups to meet and exchange their experiences and challenges in designing and using cyberinfrastructure to enable research collaborations. The event is designed to facilitate the emergence of new targets for better coordination, and to forge new collaborations into how cyberinfrastructure can enable scientific culture change.

 

For more information: https://www.nescent.org/wg_collabsci/Main_Page

 

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February 09
CIRSS researchers present at iConference 2011

 

CIRSS researchers present at iConference 2011:

Data Practices across Disciplines: Informing Collections & Curation

Data Curation Education in Research Centers: Carole L. Palmer (UIUC), Suzie Allard (Tennessee), Mary Marlino (NCAR Library)

Annotation evolution: how Web 2.0 technologies are enabling a change in annotation practices: Simone Sacchi (UIUC)

Expressiveness Requirements for Reasoning about Collection/Item Metadata Relationship: Karen Wickett (UIUC)

Data Repositories: A Home for Microblog Archives?: Tiffany Chao (UIUC)

 

The iSchools are interested in the relationship between information, people and technology. This is characterized by a commitment to learning and understanding the role of information in human endeavors. The iSchools take it as given that expertise in all forms of information is required for progress in science, business, education, and culture. This expertise must include understanding of the uses and users of information, as well as information technologies and their applications.

CIRSS researchers will be presenting their current work at the 2011 conference, February 8th - 11th.

 

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November 06
IMLS Digital Collections & Content team recieves sub-award from the Digital Public Library of America Secretariat
The IMLS Digital Collections & Content (DCC) team has received a $50,000 sub-award from the Digital Public Library of Americas (DPLA) Secretariat to further refine the teams DPLA Beta Sprint prototype. The Beta Sprint prototype was originally developed during Summer 2011 as part of the DPLA Beta Sprint. The prototype was selected as one of six finalist projects showcased during the DPLAs Fall 2011 Plenary Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Bringing together resources from over 1000 cultural heritage collections across the U.S., the prototype builds on the DCC teams knowledge and experiences aggregating metadata records from varied institutions ranging from libraries and archives to museums and historical societies. The new sub-award will allow the DCC team to make further refinements to the prototypes information retrieval algorithms and implement additional layers of interactive functionality that allow users to interact more directly and dynamically with the prototypes data. Read more




November 28
CIRSS to make strong showing at the 8th IDCC

 

CIRSS Faculty, PhD students, and staff will be making a strong showing at the 8th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC). Taking place January 14-16, 2013, IDCC brings together an international group of those who create and manage data and information, those who use it and those who research and teach about curation processes. Three students who participated in the Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) program - University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences students Christopher Eaker, Kayla Siddell, and Erica Johns - will also present posters at the conference.

Find below a full list of CIRSS participation at IDCC:

"The Product and System Specificities of Measuring Impact: Indicators of Use in Research Data Archives"
Nicholas Matthew Weber (1); Andrea K. Thomer (1); Matthew S. Mayernik (2); Robert E. Dattore (3);Zaihua Ji  (3); Steven Worley (3) Organizations: 1: University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign, Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship.; 2: National Center for Atmospheric Research- Library; 3: National Center for Atmospheric Research - CISL / RDA

"Model Development for Scientific Data Curation Education"
Mary Marlino (1); Karon Kelly (1); Matthew S. Mayernik (1); Suzie Allard (2); Carol Tenopir (2); Carole L. Palmer (3); & Virgil E. Varvel Jr. (3) Organizations: 1: National Center for Atmospheric Research; 2: University of Tennessee at Knoxville; 3: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship

"The tail and the telling: Distribtuion of NSF funding 2008-2011"
Weber, Nicholas Matthew; Organization: University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign, United States of America

"Describing the quality of research datasets across disciplines: a comparative study"
Chao, Tiffany Organization(s): University of Illinois, United States of America

"Levels of Services and Curation for High-Functioning Data"
Choudhury, G Sayeed (2); Palmer, Carole (1); Baker, Karen S (1); DiLauro, Timothy (2)  Organization(s): 1: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States of America; 2: Johns Hopkins University

"Where Have All the Scientific Data Gone: LIS Perspective on the Data At Risk Predicament"
Thompson, Cheryl Annette; Robertson, William Davenport; Greenberg, Jane; Organization: University of North Carolina, United States of America

 

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October 24
DLF/DCC DPLA Beta Sprint Effort Presented at DPLA Plenary

CIRSS and the Council on Library and Information Resources’ DLF program presented their submission to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Beta Sprint at the DPLA Plenary meeting, October 21, 2011, in Washington, DC.

The project prototype leverages the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC) resource and DLF Aquifer content as a core collection for the DPLA. The IMLS DCC, launched in 2003, is an aggregation of digital collections from libraries, museums, and archives, supported by IMLS and developed through a collaboration between CIRSS and the University of Illinois Library.

The DPLA is envisioned as a large-scale digital library that will “make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all.” In May, the DPLA Steering Committee announced a “Beta Sprint” to solicit models, prototypes, tools, and interfaces that demonstrate how the DPLA might index and provide access to a wide range of broadly distributed content. In September, an independent review panel met to discuss the 38 Beta Sprint submissions and recommend six of the most promising projects to present at the October Plenary.

The Plenary Meeting, organized by the DPLA Secretariat at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and hosted by The National Archives, brought together a range of stakeholders in an open forum to present the vision for the DPLA effort, share the best ideas and models submitted to the Beta Sprint, and engage public participation.

“I am really proud of our beta sprint, as it highlights the investment made by IMLS, the DLF community, and hundreds of libraries, museums, and archives to produce digital collections,” said DLF Director Rachel Frick.

CIRSS Director Carole Palmer said, “The sprint was a great chance to experiment with the national aggregation model we developed in the IMLS DCC project. We extended the collections, made some technical advances, and reconceived the design for the DPLA community, learning a lot along the way.”

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October 03
CIRSS Receives IMLS Award to Develop Site-Based Data Curation Framework for Long-Tail Science
The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded $499,919 for the project, Site-Based Data Curation for Small Science, led by CIRSS Director Carole Palmer, with co-Principal Investigators Bruce Fouke, Professor in Geology, Microbiology, and the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center and Associate Dean of Library Digital Programs at Johns Hopkins University; and Ann Rodman, Director of GIS Operations at Yellowstone National Park.

Bringing together experts in data curation, data repositories, geobiology, and research site management, the Site-Based Data Curation (SBDC) project will investigate and test curation policies and procedures to advance the transfer of long-tail digital data collected at Yellowstone National Park (YNP) to the Data Conservancy for preservation and access, and to better coordinate the management of data resources produced at the many scientifically significant sites at YNP. The framework will result in a general model of professional curation processes readily extendible to other national parks and other important research sites, especially cradles of biodiversity such as coral reefs and deep crustal biosphere locations.

The new data curation approaches will be integrated into the curriculum of the Specialization in Data Curation at GSLIS and undergraduate and graduate geobiology courses taught at Illinois, with educational outreach extended to Yellowstone. The education activities will advance data curation workforce expertise in handling complex, cross-disciplinary data and prepare scientific communities to contribute to and take advantage of diverse collections of curated data.

 The SBDC framework is an important step forward in evolving the professional best practices and institutional collaborations needed to build large-scale, interoperable data collections that include high-functioning long-tail data and are responsive to the pressing data needs of practicing research communities and resource management at sites of data production. Read more




March 13
Carole Palmer to present on priorities for data curation research and education
Professor of Library and Information Science and CIRSS Director, Carole Palmer, will deliver a presentation titled, "Setting Priorities for Data Curation Research and Education", at the University of North Carlolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science on March 20, 2013.  

Abstract:
"As our data curation research and education initiatives become more established, we are striving to increase impact on practice by sharpening the focus of our programs and building strategic partnerships. The theme of reuse value is now firmly at the center of our studies and extended through the core curriculum in our emphases on research cultures, collections, and representation. Moreover, our projects and programs are increasingly dependent on contributions from domain researchers, data centers, repository developers, and practitioners. I will present an overview of our investigations of data practices across more than a dozen sub-disciplines in the earth and life sciences, and our work on aggregating and modeling cultural heritage collections with developers of the Europeana Data Model. I will also introduce two important projects that represent our next phase of development:  a research collaboration to develop site-based curation principles and processes with geobiologists and resource managers at Yellowstone National Park, and an education initiative providing core curriculum and student field experiences in partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research." Read more




March 13
Research Showcase 2013
On Friday March 29, from 12:00PM - 5:00PM, CIRSS faculty and students will join GSLIS colleagues to present and share their research in a series of posters, presentations, and demonstrations. University of Illinois Vice Chancellor for Research Peter Schiffer will open the 2013 Research Showcase. The Research Showcase is an annual event open to campus and the general public.

The full program and event location can be found here: http://www.lis.illinois.edu/research/showcase.

See below for a list of CIRSS presentations, posters, and demonstrations.

Presentations

HathiTrust Research Center: New Frontiers in Digital Scholarship
J. Stephen Downie, Craig Willis & Kahyun Choi

Site-Based Data Curation at Yellowstone National Park
Carole Palmer, Bruce Fouke, Ann Rodman, Sayeed Choudhury, Andrea Thomer, Karen Baker, Abby Asangba & Karen Wickett

GSLIS at the Text REtrieval ConferenceRetrieving and Filtering Real-Time Data
Miles Efron

Posters

Identifying Claims in Social Science Literature
Shameem Ahmed, Catherine Blake, Kate Williams, Noah Lenstra & Qiyuan Liu

Describing the Quality of Research Datasets Across Disciplines: A Comparative Study
Tiffany C. Chao

Sustainable Software
Craig Evans & Jerome McDonough

On the Effect of Name Ambiguity on Measures of Large-Scale Co-Authorship Networks
Brent D. Fegley & Vetle I. Torvik

Enhancing Cultural Heritage Collections by Supporting and Analyzing Participation in Flickr
Jacob Jett, Megan Senseney & Carole L. Palmer

Location-Based Navigation: Combining OPAC Searching and 3D Visualization in a High-Density Storage Facility
Fredrick Kiwuwa Lugya & Michael B. Twidale

Site-Based Data Curation at Yellowstone National Park
Carole L. Palmer, Bruce Fouke, Ann Rodman, Sayeed Choudhury, Andrea Thomer, Karen Baker, Abby Asangba & Karen Wickett

When You Wish upon a Blog: How Collaborative Information Seeking can Interleave with CSCW
Aiko Takazawa & Michael B. Twidale

Completeness, Coverage, & Equivalence in Scientific Data Records
Andrea Thomer

Extending the Systematic Assertion Model for Humanities Research
Karen Wickett, David Dubin, Bridget Almas & Megan Senseney

Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
Carole L. Palmer, Director

HathiTrust Research Center
J. Stephen Downie, Director

Demonstrations

The Illinois Distributed Museum Project: Engineering and Technology Innovations at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Michael B. Twidale, Susan Frankenberg, Tom Ackerman & Kelsey Heffren

Exploiting Structural Data for Music Exploration
Craig Willis, J. Stephen Downie, Kahyun Choi & David Bainbridge Read more




September 05
Carole Palmer to present at Wolfram Data Summit 2012
Carole Palmer, CIRSS Director and Professor of Library and Information Science, will present “The Analytic Potential of Long-Tail Data: Sharable Data and Re-use Value” at Wolfram Data Summit 2012.  

Taking place September 6 – 7  in Washington, DC, Wolfram Data Summit 2012 is an invitation only event that offers leaders of the world's data repositories an opportunity to meet, to share insights into their work, and to discuss challenges and opportunities facing the data community. The third annual summit will place an emphasis on content, rather than infrastructure, in areas such as: data from social media, location-based data, freeing health care data, data narratives, news as data, natural language processing, government and election data, corporate data silos, culturomics, bibliometric data, data conservation, and semantic data.

More information is available here: http://www.wolframdatasummit.org/2012/ Read more




October 22
CIRSS to make strong showing at ASIS&T 2012
CIRSS Faculty, Affiliated Faculty, PhD Students, and Staff will be making yet another strong showing at ASIS&T's annual meeting. Taking place October 26-30, 2012 the ASIS&T Annual Meeting is a primary  venue for disseminating research centered on advances in the information sciences and related applications of information technology.

Find below a list of CIRSS presentations, papers, posters, and workshops:

Unreliable and Uncertain Annotators: Evaluating Rater Quality and Rating Difficulty in Online Annotation Activities
Organisciak Peter, Efron Miles, Fenlon Katrina and Megan Senseney
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/166.html

Identifying Content and Levels of Representation in Scientific Data
Karen Wickett, Simone Sacchi, David Dubin and Allen Renear
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/199.html

Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited
Nicholas Weber, Karen Baker, Andrea Thomer, Tiffany Chao and Carole Palmer
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/168.html

Tooling the Aggregator's Workbench: Metadata Visualization Through Statistical Text Analysis
Katrina Fenlon, Miles Efron and Peter Organisciak
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/161.html

Enhancing Cultural Heritage Collections by Supporting and Analyzing Participation in Flickr
Jacob Jett, Megan Senseney and Carole Palmer
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/287.html

Combined Methods, Thick Descriptions: Languages of Collaboration on Github
Nicholas Weber
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/347.html

The Data-at-Risk Initiative:  Analyzing the Current State of Endangered Scientific Data
Angela P. Murillo, Cheryl Thompson, Nico Carver, W. Davenport Robertson, Jane Greenberg and William Anderson
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/346.html

Complications in climate data variable naming
Nic Weber, Andrea Thomer, and Gary Strand Read more