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PIDapalooza 2019 – are you ready to rock!?!

Yes, it’s back and – with your support – it’s going to be better than ever! The third annual  PIDapalooza open festival of persistent identifiers will take place at the Griffith Conference Centre, Dublin, Ireland on January 23-24, 2019 – and we hope you’ll join us there!

Hosted, once again, by California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID, PIDapalooza will follow the same format as past events — rapid-fire, interactive, 30-60 minute sessions (presentations, discussions, debates, brainstorms, etc.) presented on three stages — plus main stage attractions, which will be announced shortly. New for this year is an unconference track, as suggested by several attendees last time.

In the meantime, get those creative juices flowing and send us your session PIDeas! What would you like to talk about? Hear about? Learn about? What’s important for your organization and your community and why? What’s working and what’s not? What’s needed and what’s missing? We want to hear from as many PID people as possible!  Please use this form to send us your suggestions. The PIDapalooza Festival Committee will review all forms submitted by September 21, 2018 and decide on the lineup by mid-October.

As a reminder, the regular themes are:

• PID myths: Are PIDs better in our minds than in reality? PID stands for Persistent IDentifier, but what does that mean and does such a thing exist?
• PIDs forever – achieving persistence: So many factors affect persistence: mission, oversight, funding, succession, redundancy, governance. Is open infrastructure for scholarly communication the key to achieving persistence?
• PIDs for emerging uses: Long-term identifiers are no longer just for digital objects. We have use cases for people, organizations, vocabulary terms, and more. What additional use cases are you working on?
• Legacy PIDs: There are of thousands of venerable old identifier systems that people want to continue using and bring into the modern data citation ecosystem. How can we manage this effectively?
• Bridging worlds: What would make heterogeneous PID systems ‘interoperate’ optimally? Would standardized metadata and APIs across PID types solve many of the problems, and if so, how would that be achieved? What about standardized link/relation types?
• PIDagogy: It’s a challenge for those who provide PID services and tools to engage the wider community. How do you teach, learn, persuade, discuss, and improve adoption? What’s it mean to build a pedagogy for PIDs?
• PID stories: Which strategies worked? Which strategies failed? Tell us your horror stories! Share your victories!
• Kinds of persistence: What are the frontiers of ‘persistence’? We hear lots about fraud prevention with identifiers for scientific reproducibility, but what about data papers promoting PIDs for long-term access to reliably improving objects (software, pre-prints, datasets) or live data feeds?

We’ll be posting more information on the PIDapalooza website over the coming months, as well as keeping you updated on Twitter (@pidapalooza).

In the meantime, what are you waiting for!? Book your place now — and we also strongly recommend that you book your accommodation early as there are other big conferences in Dublin that week.

PIDapalooza, Dublin, Ireland, January 23-24, 2019 – it’s a date!

The Strategic Value of Library Carpentry and The Carpentries to Research Libraries

Originally posted by Elaine L. Westbrooks

The Strategic Value of Library Carpentry and The Carpentries to Research Libraries

The Data Science Community Newsletter, a helpful resource by Laura Noren and Brad Stanger, helps us track all the data science initiatives sweeping through higher ed. Brown, Harvard, NYU, Stanford, UC Irvine, UIUC, University of Michigan, and others have launched data science initiatives in the past few years and have been announced in each newsletter.

A recent paper titled Creating Institutional Change in Data Science from the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments (MSDSE), NYU, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington, highlights the importance of library services and spaces in driving these initiatives on campuses. “Partnering with our libraries”, according to the paper, “has been an important component of these efforts.” The report also notes that libraries’ engagement with The Carpentries has strengthened ties with groups on campus.

As the MSDSE report shows, libraries can serve as the institutional home for data science initiatives within their communities. In general, libraries are a natural hub for researchers, citizens, students, programmers: we help bring people together to tackle difficult challenges.

In the report, we also see the demonstrated need researchers worldwide have to learn software and data skills. In higher ed, departments, labs, student groups all go through the cycle of creating and re-creating local meet-ups and training programs to address these needs.

Thankfully, The Carpentries curriculum and workshop offerings have expanded in recent years to respond to this need for data science training. Libraries are partnering with The Carpentries to sustain these training efforts with the help of data-savvy librarians and innovative spaces. Libraries at places like University of Oklahoma are realizing the potential of leveraging The Carpentries at scale to bring together researchers from different disciplines, foster collaboration, and be a hub for data science activities on their campuses. We also find in a recent IMLS data sciences in libraries report the recommendation that libraries should start partnering with The Carpentries to address the computational skills gap on campuses while also serving as another connection point to industry where there is a need for highly skilled and qualified candidates in data science.

At the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I see the benefits of partnering with The Carpentries. Doing so allows us to spend our time more efficiently through developing training material collaboratively at a global scale. This in turn allows librarians to focus on relationships, and teaching a common curriculum that teaches computational skills across many disciplines. Software and data skills are now needed in every discipline and, via Carpentries training, the Libraries can learn about and implement additional services that can help UNC-Chapel Hill researchers excel.

The University Libraries sees The Carpentries as a strategic way to better aligning our services to the UNC-Chapel Hill research community. In October, we will launch our initiative to train a significant number of our staff, library school faculty, and students and help them develop as instructors. The idea is simple: the Libraries will act as a hub for Carpentries activities on campus and work with our institutional partners to integrate the training in a variety of ways. I am excited about Library Carpentry and I anticipate that other libraries will equally benefit from The Carpentries efforts.

Crossposted from Library Carpentry blog: https://librarycarpentry.org/blog/2018/08/22/library-carpentry-strategic-value/

Merritt and Dash Certified as Trustworthy Repositories

University of California Curation Center (UC3) is happy to announce that its Merritt repository and companion Dash data publishing platform have received CoreTrustSeal certification. This certification helps to instill transparency and accountability to our stakeholder communities, as it provides public evidence of our adherence to community-accepted norms for the preservation and and accessibility of managed digital content.  Through this certification Merritt and Dash are joining a select group of 137 international repositories meeting established standards for demonstrating necessary technical, operational, and organizational trustworthiness.  What this certification means for our institutional users of Merritt – librarians, archivists, curators – and individual scholars and researchers using Dash is that their digital content is being stewarded and preserved for long-term access and reuse in an appropriate and effective manner.

The CTS certification process began with a critical self-audit by UC3 staff addressing issues in 16 key areas, organized into three high-level topical categories: Organizational Infrastructure (mission/scope, licensing, business continuity, ethical norms, business structure, and expertise and consultation); Digital Object Management (data integrity and authenticity, appraisal, storage, preservation planning, quality assurance, documented workflows, identification and discovery, and facilitating reuse); and Technology (infrastructure and security).  The UC3 submission was then reviewed by independent external experts who provided valuable comments and feedback, asking only for minor clarification of several points. Our revised submission was given final approval on August 7, 2018.

While certification does not entail any change in established behavior or workflow by Merritt and Dash users, it is indicative of a higher level of curatorial and preservation service and assurance provided by those systems and the UC3 team.  The achievement of certification is a reflection of UC3’s and CDL’s ongoing commitment to support innovative and sustainable open scholarship. It is also an important step in meeting the UC Libraries’ complementary strategic goals of maximizing discovery of and ensuring long-term access to the University’s valuable and often unique digital content.

The CoreTrustSeal (CTS) certification instrument and organization represents the consolidation of two prior independent certification groups: the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) and the ICSU World Data System (WDS).  CTS is also a component of the European Framework for Audit and Certification of Digital Repositories, a collaboration between CTS, the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems (CCSDS), developer of the influential ISO 14721 Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model and its companion ISO 16363 Audit and Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories (TDR) standard, and DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung), the German national standards organization.

Merritt, a redesigned digital repository

We’ve updated the Merritt UI design!

This redesign is intended to showcase our certification as a CoreTrustSeal trustworthy data repository and highlight some of the library and archival projects that entrust their preservation to Merritt.

With this update come updates to the Merritt web interface to:

• Design – now matches the style across the new home page and content pages
• Technical – changes are mostly cosmetic but also includes mobile-friendly interface and improvements for accessibility
• Help – links to documentation now point to pages in our new GitHub-based documentation wiki

Best of all, this new design makes it easier to keep Merritt’s information up to date going forward.

Check out the new look here https://merritt.cdlib.org/

Org ID: a recap and a hint of things to come

Over the past couple of years, a group of organizations with a shared purpose—California Digital Library, Crossref, DataCite, and ORCID—invested our time and energy into launching the Org ID initiative, with the goal of defining requirements for an open, community-led organization identifier registry.  The goal of our initiative has been to offer a transparent, accessible process that builds a better system for all of our communities. As the working group chair, I wanted to provide an update on this initiative and let you know where our efforts are headed.

Community-led effort

FIrst, I would like to summarize all of the work that has gone into this project, a truly community-driven initiative, over the last two years:

• A series of collaborative workshops were held at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting in San Antonio TX (2016), the FORCE11 conference in Portland OR (2016), and at PIDapalooza in Reykjavik (2016).
• Findings from these workshops were summarized in three documents, which we made openly available to the community for public comment:
  • Organization Identifier Project: A Way Forward (PDF)
  • Organization Identifier Provider Landscape (PDF)
  • Technical Considerations for an Organization Identifier Registry (PDF)
• A Working Group worked throughout 2017 and voted to approve a set of recommendations and principles for ‘governance’ and ‘product’:
  • Governance Recommendations
  • Product Principles and Recommendations
• We then put out a Request for Information that sought expressions of interest from organizations to be involved in implementing and running an organization identifier registry.
• There was a really good response to the RFI; reviewing the responses and thinking about next steps led to our most recent stakeholder meeting in Girona in January 2018, where ORCID, DataCite, and Crossref were tasked with drafting a proposal that meets the Working Group’s requirements for a community-led, organizational identifier registry.

Thank you

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this effort so far.  We’ve been able to make good progress with the initiative because of the time and expertise many of you have volunteered. We have truly benefited from the support of the community, with representatives from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; American Physical Society, California Digital Library, Cornell University, Crossref, DataCite, Digital Science, Editeur, Elsevier, Foundation for Earth Sciences, Hindawi, Jisc, ORCID, Ringgold, Springer Nature, The IP Registry, and U.S. Geological Survey involved throughout this initiative.  And we couldn’t have done any of it without the help and guidance of our consultants, Helen Szigeti and Kristen Ratan.

The way forward

The recommendations from our initiative have been converted into a concrete plan for building a registry for research organizations.  This plan will be posted in the coming weeks.

The initiative’s leadership group has already secured start-up resourcing and is getting ready to announce the launch plan—more details coming soon.  

We hope that all stakeholders will continue to support the next phase of our work — look for announcements in the coming weeks about how to get involved.  

As always, we welcome your feedback and involvement as this effort continues. Please contact me directly with any questions or comments at john.chodacki@ucop.edu. And thanks again for your help bringing an open organization identifier registry to fruition!

References

This was crossposted from the DataCite blog on Aug 2, 2018: https://doi.org/10.5438/67sj-4y05