I’ve been in our nation’s capital since Sunday for three meetings, all while battling a particularly tenacious cold. I’m using this post as a debrief, as well as to tell you about a few nifty projects.
First, the University of North Texas folks put on a symposium about the DataRes Project. UNT librarians are quite the players in the data curation landscape these days – check out their website Data Management @UNT for more information. The DataRes Project is funded by the IMLS and “investigates how the library and information science (LIS) profession can best respond to emerging needs of research data management in universities.” Although I’ve only been involved with libraries since 2011, I’m pretty darn excited about the role that libraries are poised to play in data management. Sounds like UNT agrees!
The second meeting was the Coalition for Networked Information 2012 Fall Members Meeting. The Coalition for Networked information (CNI) is an institutional membership organization, with members that include universities, publishers, libraries, IT companies, governmental folks, and others. These groups have a common interest in figuring out ways to facilitate communication, collaboration, and innovation in information management. I presented on the DMPTool, which was greeted with excitement by members of the audience. I also attended quite a few “project briefings” (i.e., sessions), wherein I heard about other interesting goings on in the world of information.
The briefing I enjoyed most was about FORCE11. It’s all caps because it’s an acronym: the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship. The “11” is because the group was founded in 2011. FORCE11 is a “virtual community working to transform scholarly communications toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. ” I plan to join up with this group for their meeting Beyond the PDF 2 in March. Stay tuned for more on that group – I think they have the potential to really shape the future of scholarly communication.
The third and final meeting this week is still going on – the E-Science Institute. I blogged about E-Science last week, so I won’t go into detail on that aspect of the meeting. But the basic idea is that libraries attend this meeting to think about ways to shape their “Strategic Agenda” for supporting science in this age of digital, big, complicated data and analyses. You can see how this might fit in with the DataRes project. I like the idea of empowering libraries to take on all things data!
