Researchers increasingly need to integrate the disposition, management and curation of their data into their current workflows. However, it is not yet clear to what extent faculty and students are sufficiently prepared to take on these responsibilities. This paper articulates the need for a data information literacy program (DIL) to prepare students to engage in such an “e-research” environment. Assessments of faculty interviews and student performance in a geoinformatics course provide complementary sources of information, which are then filtered through the perspective of ACRL’s information literacy competency standards to produce a draft set of outcomes for a data information literacy program.

This article considers digital curation in doctoral study and the role of the doctoral supervisor and institution in facilitating students’ acquisition of digital curation skills, including some of the potentially problematic expectations of the supervisory relationship with regards to digital curation. Research took the form of an analysis of the current digital curation training landscape, focussing on doctoral study and supervision. This was followed by a survey (n=116) investigating attitudes towards importance, expertise, and responsibilities regarding digital curation. This research confirms that digital curation is considered to be very important within doctoral study but that doctoral supervisors and particularly students consider themselves to be largely unskilled at curation tasks. It provides a detailed picture of curation activity within doctoral study and identifies the areas of most concern. A detailed analysis demonstrates that most of the responsibility for curation is thought to lie with students and that institutions are perceived to have very low responsibility and that individuals tend to over-assign responsibility to themselves. Finally, the research identifies which types of support system for curation are most used and makes suggestions for ways in which students, supervisors, institutions, and others can effectively and efficiently address problematic areas and improve digital curation within doctoral study.

The Data Curation Profiles Toolkit (DCPT) emerged out of a Purdue University Libraries’ 2004 initiative to engage in multidisciplinary research. It is a tool developed to assist librarians and other information professionals to conduct data interviews and identify the needs of researchers when managing, sharing, or curating their data. The DCPT has been widely adopted and applied in various contexts but its usability as a tool has not been formally assessed. To address this need, we have conducted a survey of users of the DCPT. The survey included quantitative measures of potential influencing factors of using the DCPT and its perceived usability (its usefulness as a tool and its ease of use). Open-ended questions about users’ experiences with the DCPT were also included to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the tool, as well as areas that could be improved. Factor analysis of the quantitative results and subsequent regression models revealed several underlying factors that affect the perceived usability of the DCPT. Responses to the open-ended questions revealed several themes of users’ concerns: the amount of time required to use the DCPT, the structure and format of the DCPT, alignment of the DCPT with particular contexts, and the use of the DCPT to engage faculty and the library community. By correlating themes identified from the open-ended questions with the analysis of quantitative data, this paper provides the first empirical assessment of the DCPT that could help further improve the toolkit’s usability based on user needs and expectations. The methodology used in the study could readily be applied to assess and improve the utility of other tools used by data and information professional.

On Friday the 13th, I gave the morning keynote at the Online Northwest Conference  in Corvallis, OR. Thanks so much to the organization for ...

Last para is 100% bogus, but the rest is decent.

The following is a guest post by Jody DeRidder, Head of Digital Services at the University of Alabama Libraries.  This post reports on efforts in the digital preservation community that align with the Library’s Digital Preservation Outreach & Education (DPOE) Program. Jody, among many other accomplishments, has completed one of the DPOE Train-the-Trainer workshops and […]

Tutorial for DAM. Requires signup.

The Library of Congress and its digital preservation partners from the federal, library, creative, publishing, technology, and copyright communities are working to develop a national strategy to collect, archive, and preserve digital content.

Research Data MANTRA (or Management Training) is a labour of love. It has been an integral part of the University of Edinburgh's Research Data Management (RDM) programme since 2012. The staff at EDINA and Data Library at the University of Edinburgh has been curating this resource, based on internal and external feedback and has just published its fourth release since 2011. MANTRA is an open, web-based training course intended for self-paced learning by PhD students and early career researchers or others who manage digital data as part of a research project. It informs about good practice in research data management with real life stories. MANTRA’s approach is to be fun, relevant, useful, interactive and timely (FRUIT!). Librarians’ training needs are catered for through a companion resource, the DIY RDM Training Kit for Librarians.

Outline of a personal digital archiving activity suitable for a lay audience. "Find the person" in the heap of disorganized whatever.