Quarterly Report - May through July 2012
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
The first quarter of my postgraduate internship has been an extremely varied one, and one which I have tackled several different aspects of the project. Because this is the beginning of a new investigation for the Research Library, I think it is appropriate that I explore data management at LANL from multiple perspectives. I have spent a considerable amount of time doing a literature search and taking notes on what I've been reading in preparation for potential writing activities later. The Research Library is not the only research library exploring the possibility of providing services to their user base. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the UK are actively pursuing possibilities to preserve the scientific record. DataOne is a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative aimed at helping to curate bioscience data. This is just a tiny sample of the organizations actively looking into the issues surrounding data management on an organizational, cultural, or technical level. I have included a partial bibliography of some papers I have read. Based on what I read, various discussions, and previous library training, I have begun to document the services I feel I could provide researchers in the context of my internship. This is still very much a work in progress as I learn more about the landscape in libraries and at the Laboratory. I have detailed this process and my thoughts on the issue below. As data management is such a complex and interconnected activity, it is impossible to investigate the organizational and cultural needs of the researchers without familiarizing myself with technologies that could facilitate the local cataloging and preservation of data sets. I have spent some time investigating the repository software DSpace. The library has long maintained the digital object repository aDORe, but the differences in features and lack of a user interface compared to DSpace have made DSpace a good test bed for this project. However my internship is not about repository software and DSpace is just one potential tool for supporting researchers and their data. More details my repository investigation. The most exciting aspect of the project thus far has been meeting with researchers, some of which are potential collaborators. Some people I have talked with have been very interested and enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating, while others have not wanted to discuss the issue at all. I have had discussions with individual researchers managing their own lab as well as with researchers who are part of much larger collaborations. Three of the research groups whom I feel are of particular interest are detailed below. I have added an appendix below which goes into more detail about the protein crystallography community which has addressed the complete data life cycle within their field end to end. The issue of data management is much bigger than just my internship and there are several people and organizations exploring the issues at the Laboratory. I am making every effort to stay focused on small science data sets and ensure that my activities use standards-based approaches and are sustainable.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE/LANL
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1048387
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-12-23984; TRN: US201217%%42
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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