This past Sunday and Monday, DataONE had their annual Users Group Meeting (DUG) in Madison, WI. The meeting is a chance for librarians, information specialists, data center managers, developers, and other interested folks to get an update on DataONE and provide feedback on how the project is proceeding. One of the many reports given covered the Investigator Toolkit that DataONE is developing alongside the cyber-infrastructure. The DataUp tools will be part of this toolkit, and I attended DUG to demonstrate the add-in.
I’m happy to report that DataUp was a resounding success. More importantly, there is much interest in extending the current functionality and capabilities of the tool, which is possible because the DataUp project’s code will be open source. There was talk of hackathons, hiring summer student interns to improve on the code, and whether it was worthwhile to extend the add-in to Mac versions of Excel. Discussions were lively and interesting, only to be concluded on the announcement that cookies were available at the break.
I’ve posted the slides for my DataUp presentation, but you will have to wait for the software a bit longer. The beta version for testing is due out this week, and the final version of the software will be completed later this month. Stay tuned!
