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2016-2017 report for the Qualitative Social Science and Humanities Data Interest Group (QSSHDIG)

The Qualitative Social Science and Humanities Data Interest Group (QSSHDIG) was formed in fall 2016. We decided to focus our efforts on the conference this year. We have some continuing projects planned for next year. We are meeting at the conference on Tuesday, May 22 at 4pm in the Oread Lobby.
IASSIST 2017 Conference activities:
Continuing Projects:
  • We are developing a blog post series on the challenges of balancing teaching/providing resources for qualitative *software* against teaching/providing resources for qualitative methods. Mandy is currently leading that effort.
  • We have been working on developing a LibGuide compiling qualitative and humanities data resources (e.g., finding data sources, analysis tools, etc.). We are gathering some resources now and will talk more about this at our group meeting tomorrow. Lynda is leading this effort.
  • We also have an email list for everyone interested in Qualitative Social Science or Humanities Data research.
  • We would love to have any  members help out with these efforts. If you are interested, please email Lynda or Mandy.

#IDCC17: Notes from the International Digital Curation Conference 2017

For the third time IASSIST sponsored the International Digital Curation Conference. This time allowing three students, one each from Switzerland, Korea, and Canada to attend the conference, which titled itself "Upstream, Downstream: embedding digital curation workflows for data science, scholarship and society".

Data science was a strong theme of the three keynote presentations, in particular how curation and data management are an active, integrated, ongoing parts of analysis rather than a passive epilogue in research.

Maria Wolters talked about how missing data can provide research insights analysing patterns of absence and, counter-intuitively, can improve the quality of datasets through the concept of managed forgetting –asking is it important to preserve and is it relevant at the moment – we can better manage and find data. Alice Daish showed her work as a data scientist at the British Museum, with the goal of enabling data informed decision-making. This involved identifying data "silos" and "wrangling" data in to exportable formats, along with zealous use and promotion of R, but also thinking about the way data is communicated to management. Chris Williams demonstrated how the Alan Turing Institute handles data mining. He reports that about 80 percent of work on data mining involves understanding and preparing data. This ranges from understanding formats and running descriptives to look for outliers and anomalies to cleaning untidy and inconsistent metadata and coding. The aim is to automate as much of this as possible with the Automatic Statistician project.

In a session on data policies, University of Toronto's Dylanne Dearborn and Leanne Trimble showed how libraries can use creative thinking to matching publication patterns against journal data policies in providing support. Fieke Schoots outlined the approach at Leiden which includes requirements from PhD's to state location of research data before their defence can take place and twenty year retention for Data Management Plans. Switching to journals, Ian Hrynaszkiewicz talked about the work Springer Nature has done to standardise journal data polices into one of four types allied with support for authors and editors on policy identification and implementation.

Ruth Geraghty dealt with ethical challenges in retro-fitting a data set for sharing. She introduced the Children’s Research Network for Ireland and Northern Ireland. This involved attempting to obtain consent from participants for sharing, but also work on anonymising the data to enable sharing. Although a problematic and resource intensive endeavour the result is not only a reusable data set but informed guidance for other projects on archiving and sharing. Niamh Moore has long experience of archiving her research and focused on another legacy archive – the Clayoquot Lives oral history project. Niamh is using Omeka as a sharing platform because it gives the researcher control of how the data can be presented for reuse. For example, Omeka has capacity for creating exhibits to showcase themes.

Community is important in both curation and management. Marta Teperek and Rosie Higman introduced work at Cambridge on collaborative communities and data champions. Finding a top-down compliance approach was not working, Cambridge moved to a bottom-up engagement style bringing researchers into decision-making on policies and support. Data champions are a new approach to seed advocates and trainers around the university as local contact points, based on a community of practice model. The rewards of this approach are potentially rich, but the cost of setting-up and managing it are high and the behaviour of the community is not always controllable. Two presentations on community/citizen science from Andrea Copeland and Peter Darch also hit on the theme of controlling groups in curating data. The Galaxy Zoo project found there were lessons to learn about the behaviour of volunteers, particularly the negative impact of a "league table" credit system in retaining contributors, and how volunteers expected to only contribute classifications were in some cases doing data science work in noticing unusual objects.

A topic of relevance to social science focused curation is sensitive data. Debra Hiom introduced University of Bristol's method of providing safe access to sensitive data. Once again, it's resource intensive - requiring a committee classification of data into levels of access and process reviews to ensure applications are genuine. However the result is that data that cannot be open can be shared responsibly. Sebastian Karcher from the Qualitative Data Archive spoke about managing sensitive data in the cloud, a task further complicated by the lack of a federal data protection law in the United States. Elizabeth Hull (Dryad) presented on developing an ethical framework for curating social media data. A common perception is social media posts are fair use, if made public. However, from an ethical perspective posters may not understand their "data" is being collected for research purposes and users need to know that use of @ or # on Twitter means they are inviting involvement and sharing in wider discussions. Hull offered a "STEP" approach as way to deal with social media data, balancing benefit of preservation and sharing against risk of harm and reasonable consent from research subjects.

IASSIST's Statement in Response to President’s Executive Order on Visas and Immigration


February 13, 2017

Statement of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST at http://iassistdata.org) in response to President Trump's January 27 Executive Order on Visas and Immigration, titled "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES".

The recent executive order on visas and immigration issued on January 27th by US President Trump is of grave concern to IASSIST as an organization. IASSIST, the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology, is an international organization of professionals working in and with information technology, libraries, data services and research & higher education to support open science, advocate for responsible data management and use, build a broader community surrounding research data, and encourage the development of data professionals. Our membership is international, and we greatly value the ability to travel and meet to share knowledge at locations around the world. Our international fellows program and other initiatives are specifically designed to encourage participation from underrepresented regions, including the Muslim-majority countries targeted by the executive order.

While recognizing the authority of the United States over its borders, there are several aspects of this order that are troubling, viz.:

  1. Its sudden and chaotic implementation has led to severe uncertainty over whether rules and practices for entering the United States will be subject to rapid and arbitrary change.
  2. It has led to the detention of lawful permanent residents of the United States, the revocation of visas previously granted under proper vetting procedures, the perception of potential discrimination on the basis of religion, and the humanitarian crisis caused by ceasing to accept refugees.
  3. Its introduction of several restrictive elements into the domain of visas and immigration, such as the statement that those entering the US, including temporary visitors, must "support the Constitution".

For these reasons, the order generates a hostile climate for the open, collaborative scientific work of our organization, both for non-US persons seeking to work and collaborate with Americans, and for Americans traveling and working outside of the US to collaborate who may face retributive actions from other states. Our membership has legitimate concerns about whether travel to the US is possible under such conditions. The order also may have long-term repercussions that damage the reputation of the US as a location that is open to visitors and immigrants, supporting the open exchange of ideas, and protected under the rule of law from arbitrary changes impacting human freedom. In response, IASSIST will continue to speak out in favor of our organization's goals, and against such threats to international collaboration in research and data sharing.

Our May 2017 annual conference will be held in Lawrence, Kansas. Arrangements were begun long before the Executive Order on Visas and Immigration, and it is impossible to change the venue at this date. IASSIST stands in solidarity with its members and encourages them to attend the conference and participate in the international exchange of ideas that is the purpose of our association. We hope that no member will be denied entry into the US due to the administration's recent actions. IASSIST will assist its membership with visa issues and other concerns emanating from this order. We also reaffirm that we are committed to an environment free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, at the annual conference and all IASSIST activities.

 Tuomas J. Alaterä, President
 Jen Green, Vice-President
 Ryan Womack, Secretary
 Thomas Lindsay, Treasurer

International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST)

IASSIST Call for Event Sponsorship Proposals

The IASSIST Liaison and Organizational Sponsorship Task Force is seeking proposals for sponsorships of regional or local events during calendar year 2017. The goal of these sponsorships is to support local networks of data professionals and data-related activities across the globe in order to help support IASSISTers activities throughout the year and increase awareness of the value of IASSIST membership.

Events should be a gathering of data professionals from multiple institutions and may vary in size and scope from workshops, symposia, conferences, etc. These may be established events or new endeavors. We are particularly looking to sponsor regional or local level events that will attract data professionals who would benefit from IASSIST membership, but may not always be able to travel to attend IASSIST conferences. Preference will be given to events from geographic areas outside of traditional IASSIST conference locations (North America and Western Europe), and from underrepresented membership areas as such as Latin/South America, Africa, Asia/Pacific, and Eastern Europe.

Requests for sponsorships may be monetary, and may also include a request for mentorship assistance by matching the event planning committee with an experienced IASSIST member with relevant expertise (e.g., conference planning, subject/content, geographic familiarity).

Accepted events will be required to designate an active IASSIST member as the liaison. Generally, this would be an IASSIST member who will be attending the event and although not required, may be on the planning committee or otherwise contributing to the event. The liaison will be responsible for assistance with coordinating logistics related to the sponsorship, ensuring that the sponsorship is recognized at the event, and contributing a post to the IASSIST iBlog about the event.

Proposals should include:

  • Name of the event and event details (date, location, any other pertinent information)
  • Organizing or hosting institution
  • Description of event and how it relates to IASSIST goals and communities
  • Specific request for sponsorship: amount of money and/or mentorship assistance
  • Description of how the sponsorship will be used
  • Name and contact information of person submitting proposal and designated event liaison to IASSIST (if different)

Proposals are due on Friday, January 13 2017 via the Application Form. Notification of sponsorship awards will be by Friday, Feb 3 2017. The number and monetary extent of awarded sponsorships will depend on the number and quality of applications received. Individual sponsorship requests may range from $0 USD (request for mentorship only) to $2,000 USD.

Please direct questions to Hailey Mooney, IASSIST Membership Chair (haileym@umich.edu).

Notes from the second Jisc Research Data Network event

Jisc held their second Research Data Network event in Cambridge. I went along to take notes.

Danny Kingsley gave an overview of why data sharing is important, which was useful as introduction for those new to this, and a refresher of first principles to the more experienced.

The day then moved into parallel sessions on aspects of the network's activity.

The Research Data Shared Service is an initiative to help intuitions with RDM infrastructure. Jisc research suggests the priority for universities is addressing the digital preservation gap. Consequently, Jisc are looking at providing data repository and long-term preservation services as well as considering how a service could integrate with existing CRIS systems and repositories. This will take place in a "University of Jisc" that allows a testing environment using research data.

Jisc are developing templates and guidance for publishers on creating a research data policy which can then adapt to their journals. They are working with Springer Nature who are trying to fit their 3000 journals to into one of four types of data policy, ranging from encouraged to mandatory sharing and availability criteria.

Cambridge's Research Data support service provided insight into engaging researchers in research data management. Their initial compliance message was not working, so they switched to a positive benefits message. This is underpinned by "adequate provisions": online information, consultancies, reviewing data management plan, and training sessions. They also invest resources in advocacy and outreach including a "democratic" approach involving researchers in shaping the service and policies.

Jisc are developing a "core" metadata profile for research data. The profile is based on focus group testing, and integration with existing standards. The aim is to encourage better quality metadata submissions from researchers, with "gold, silver, and bronze" thresholds.

The final session introduced Jisc's template business case for RDM support. This is intended to allow institutions to adapt a structured case for supporting RDM services that can be presented to university management. The case covers the economic benefits of data sharing and preservation, along with institutional and researcher benefits, with a focus on numbers. My particular favourite: UK universities hold an estimated 450 petabytes of research data. The case will be available this autumn.

Should you have further interest in their activities, Jisc have a Research Data Network website and presentations from the day are also available.

IQ 40:1 Now Available!

Our World and all the Local Worlds
Welcome to the first issue of Volume 40 of the IASSIST
Quarterly (IQ 40:1, 2016). We present four papers in this issue.
The first paper presents data from our very own world,
extracted from papers published in the IQ through four
decades. What is published in the IQ is often limited in
geographical scope and in this issue the other three papers
present investigations and project research carried out at
New York University, Purdue University, and the Federal
Reserve System. However, the subject scope of the papers
and the methods employed bring great diversity. And
although the papers are local in origin they all have a strong
focus for generalization in order to spread the information
and experience.


We proudly present the paper that received the 'best
paper award' at the IASSIST conference 2015. Great thanks
are expressed to all the reviewers who took part in the
evaluation! In the paper 'Social Science Data Archives: A
Historical Social Network Analysis' the authors Kristin R.
Eschenfelder (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Morgaine
Gilchrist Scott, Kalpana Shankar, and Greg Downey
are reporting on inter-organizational influence and
collaboration among social science data archives through
data of articles published in IASSIST Quarterly in 1976
to 2014. The paper demonstrates social network analysis
(SNA) using a web of 'nodes' (people/authors/institutions)
and 'links' (relationships between nodes). Several types
of relationships are identified: influencing, collaborating,
funding, and international. The dynamics are shown in
detail by employing five year sections. I noticed that from
a reluctant start the amount of relationships has grown
significantly and archives have continuously grown better
at bringing in 'influence' from other 'nodes'. The paper
contributes to the history of social science data archives and
the shaping of a research discipline.


The paper 'Understanding Academic Patrons’ Data Needs
through Virtual Reference Transcripts: Preliminary Findings
from New York University Libraries' is authored by Margaret
Smith and Jill Conte who are both librarians at New York
University, and Samantha Guss, a librarian at University
of Richmond who worked at New York University from
2009-14. The goal of their paper is 'to contribute to the
growing body of knowledge about how information
needs are conceptualized and articulated, and how this
knowledge can be used to improve data reference in an
academic library setting'. This is carried out by analysis of
chat transcripts of requests for census data at NYU. There is
a high demand for the virtual services of the NYU Libraries
and there are as many as 15,000 annual chat transactions.
There has not been much qualitative research of users'
data needs, but here the authors exemplify the iterative
nature of grounded theory with data collection and analysis
processes inextricably entwined and also using a range of
software tools like FileLocator Pro, TextCrawler, and Dedoose.
Three years of chat reference transcripts were filtered down
to 147 transcripts related to United States and international
census data. The unique data provides several insights,
shown in the paper. However, the authors are also aware of
the limitations in the method as it did not include whether
the patron or librarian considered the interaction successful.
The conclusion is that there is a need for additional librarian
training and improved research guides.


The third paper is also from a university. Amy Barton, Paul
J. Bracke, Ann Marie Clark, all from Purdue University,
collaborated on the paper 'Digitization, Data Curation,
and Human Rights Documents: Case Study of a Library
Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration'. The project
concerns the digitization of Urgent Action Bulletins of
Amnesty International from 1974 to 2007. The political
science research centered on changes of transnational
human rights advocacy and legal instrumentation, while
the Libraries’ research related to data management,
metadata, data lifecycle, etcetera. The specific research
collaboration model developed was also generalized for
future practitioner-librarian collaboration projects. The
project is part of a recent tendency where academic
libraries will improve engagement and combine activities
between libraries and users and institutions. The project
attempts to integrate two different lifecycle models thus
serving both research and curatorial goals where the
central question is: 'can digitization processes be designed
in a manner that feeds directly into analytical workflows
of social science researchers, while still meeting the
needs of the archive or library concerned with long-term
stewardship of the digitized content?'. The project builds
on data of Urgent Action Bulletins produced by Amnesty
International for indication of how human rights concerns
changed over time, and the threats in different countries
at different periods, as well as combining library standards
for digitization and digital collections with researcher-driven
metadata and coding strategies. The data creation
started with the scanning and creation of the optical
character recognized (OCR) version of full text PDFs for text
recognition and modeling in NVivo software. The project
did succeed in developing shared standards. However, a
fundamental challenge was experienced in the grant-driven
timelines for both library and researcher. It seems to me that
the expectation of parallel work was the challenge to the
project. Things take time.


In the fourth paper we enter the case of the Federal Reserve
System. San Cannon and Deng Pan, working at the Federal
Reserve Bank in Kansas City and Chicago, created a pilot
for an infrastructure and workflow support for making the
publication of research data a regular part of the research
lifecycle. This is reported in the paper 'First Forays into
Research Data Dissemination: A Tale from the Kansas City
Fed'. More than 750 researchers across the system produce
yearly about 1,000 journal articles, working papers, etcetera.
The need for data to support the research has been
recognized, and the institution is setting up a repository
and defining a workflow to support data preservation
and future dissemination. In early 2015 the internal Center
for the Advancement of Research and Data in Economics
(CADRE) was established with a mission to support, enhance,
and advance data or computationally intensive research,
and preservation and dissemination were identified as
important support functions for CADRE. The paper presents
details and questions in the design such as types of
collections, kind and size of data files, and demonstrates
influence of testers and curators. The pilot also had to
decide on the metadata fields to be used when data is
submitted to the system. The complete setup including
incorporated fields was enhanced through pilot testing and
user feedback. The pilot is now being expanded to other
Federal Reserve Banks.


Papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome.
We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other
conferences and workshops, from local presentations or
papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing
a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time
presentation into a lasting contribution. We permit authors
'deep links' into the IQ as well as deposition of the paper in
your local repository. Chairing a conference session with
the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a
special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information
reaches many more people than the session participants,
and will be readily available on the IASSIST website at
http://www.iassistdata.org.


Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions
and layout: http://iassistdata.org/iq/instructions-authors.

Authors can also contact me via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk.
Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for
the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear
from you.


Karsten Boye Rasmussen
June 2016
Editor

IASSIST 2016 Program At-A-Glance, Part 2: Data infrastructure, data processing and research data management

 

Here's another list of highlights from IASSIST2016 which is focusing on the data revolution. For previous highlights, see here.

Infrastructure

  • For those of you with an interest in technical infrastructure, the University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur will showcase an early protype MMRepo (1 June, 3F), whose function is to store qualitative and quantitative data into one big data repository.
  • The UK Data Service will present the following panel "The CESSDA Technical Framework - what is it and why is it needed?", which elaborates how the CESSDA Research Infrastructure should have modern data curation techniques rooted in sophisticated IT capabilities at its core, in order to better serve its community.

  • If you have been wondering about the various operational components and the associated technology counterparts involved with running a data science repository, then the presentation by ICPSR is for you. Participants in that panel will leave with an understanding of how the Archonnex Architecture at ICPSR is strengthening the data services offered to new researchers and much more.

Data processing

Be sure to check out the aforementioned infrastructure offerings if you’re interested in data processing, but also check out a half-day workshop on 31 May, “Text Processing with Regular Expressions,” presented by Harrison Dekker, UC Berkeley, that will help you learn regular expression syntax and how to use it in R, Python, and on the command line. The workshop will be example-driven.

Data visualisation

If you are comfortable working with quantitative data and are familiar with the R tool for statistical computing and want to learn how to create a variety of visualisations, then the workshop by the University of Minnesota on 31 May is for you. It will introduce the logic behind ggplot2 and give participants hands-on experience creating data visualizations with this package. This session will also introduce participants to related tools for creating interactive graphics from this syntax.

Programming

  • If you’re interesting in programming there’s a full-day Intro to Python for Data Wrangling workshop on 31 May, led by Tim Dennis, UC San Diego,  that will provide tools to use scientific notebooks in the cloud, write basic Python programs, integrate disparate csv files and more.

  • Also, the aforementioned Regular Expressions workshop also on 31 May will offer  in-workshop opportunities  to working with real data and perform representative data cleaning and validation operations in multiple languages.

Research data management

  • Get a behind-the-scenes look at data management and see how an organization such as the Odum Institute manages its archiving workflows, head to “Automating Archive Policy Enforcement using Dataverse and iRODS” on 31 May with presenters from the UNC Odom Institute, UNC Chapel Hill. ’Participants will see machine actionable rules in practice and be introduced to an environment where written policies can be expressed in ways an archive can automate their enforcement.

  • Another good half-day workshop, targeted to for people tasked with teaching good research data management practices to researchers is  “Teaching Research Data Management Skills Using Resources and Scenarios Based on Real Data,” 31 May, with presenters from ICPSR, the UK Data Archive and FORS. The organisers of this workshop will showcase recent examples of how they have developed teaching resources for hands-on-training, and will talk about successes and failures in this regard.

Tools

If you’re just looking to add more resources to your data revolution toolbox, whether it’s metadata, teaching, data management, open and restricted access, or documentation, here’s a quick list of highlights:

  • At Creating GeoBlacklight Metadata: Leveraging Open Source Tools to Facilitate Metadata Genesis (31 May), presenters from New York University will provide hands-on experience in creating GeoBlacklight geospatial metadata, including demos on how to capture, export, and store GeoBlacklight metadata.

  • DDI Tools Demo (1 June). The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing statistical and social science data.

  • DDI tools: No Tools, No Standard (3 June), where participants will be introduced to the work of the DDI Developers Community and get an overview of tools available from the community.

Open-access

As mandates for better accessibility of data affects more researchers, dive into the Conversation with these IASSIST offerings:

Metadata

Don’s miss IASSIST 2016’s offerings on metadata, which is the data about the data that makes finding and working with data easier to do. There are many offerings, with a quick list of highlights below:

  • Creating GeoBlacklight Metadata: Leveraging Open Source Tools to Facilitate Metadata Genesis (Half-day workshop, 31 May), with presenters from New York University

  • At Posters and Snacks on 2 June, Building A Metadata Portfolio For Cessda, with presenters from the Finnish Social Science Data Archive; GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences; and UK Data Service

Spread the word on Twitter using #IASSIST16. 


A story by Dory Knight-Ingram (
ICPSR)

Interested in the “data revolution” and what it means for research? Here’s why you should attend IASSIST2016

 

Part 1: Data sharing, new data sources and data protection

IASSIST is an international organisation of information technology and data services professionals which aims to provide support to research and teaching in the social sciences. It has over 300 members ranging from data archive staff and librarians to statistical agencies, government departments and non-profit organisations.

The theme of this year’s conference is Embracing the ‘data revolution’: opportunities and challenges for research” and it is the 42nd of its kind, taking place every year. IASSIST2016 will take place in Bergen, Norway, from 31 May to 3 June, hosted by NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data.

Here is a first snapshot of what is there and why it is important.

Data sharing

If you have ever wondered whether data sharing is to the advantage of researchers, there will be a session led by Utrecht University Library exploring the matter. The first results of a survey which explores personal beliefs, intention and behaviour regarding the sharing of data will also be presented by GESIS. The relationship between data sharing and data citation, relatively overlooked until now, will then be addressed by the Australian Data Archive.

If you are interested in how a data journal could incentivise replications in economics, you should think about attending a session by ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics which will present some studies describing the outcome of replication attempts and discuss the meaning of failed replications in economics.

GESIS will then look into improving research data sharing by addressing different scholarly target groups such as individual researchers, academic institutions, or scientific journals, all of which place diverse demands on a data sharing tool. They will focus on the tools offered by GESIS as well as a joint tool, “SowiDataNet”, offered together with the Social Science Centre Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research, and the German National Library of Economic.

The UKDA and UKDS will present a paper which seeks to explore the role that case studies of research can play in regard to effective data sharing, reuse and impact.

The Data Archive in Finland (FSD) will also be presented as a case study of an archive that is broadening its services to the health sciences and humanities, disciplines in which data sharing practices have not yet been established.

If you’d like to know more about data accessibility, which is being required by journals and mandated by government funders, join a diverse group of open data experts as IASSIST dives into open data dialogue that includes presentations on Open Data and Citizen Empowerment and 101 Cool Things to do with Open Data as part of the “Opening up on open data workshop.” Presenters will be from archives from across the globe.

New data sources

A talk entitled “Data science: The future of social science?” by UKDA will introduce its conceptual and technical work in developing a big data platform for social science and outline preliminary findings from work using energy data.

If you have been wondering about the role of social media data in the academic environment, the session by the University of California will include an overview of the social media data landscape and the Crimson Hexagon product.

The three Vs of big data, volume, variety and velocity, are being explored in the “Hybrid Data Lake” being built by UKDA using the Universal Decimal Classification platform and expanding “topics” search while using big data management. Find out more about it as well as possible future applications.

Data protection

If you follow data protection issues, the panel on “Data protection: legal and ethical reviews” is for you, starting off with a presentation of the Administrative Data Research Network's (ADRN) Citizen's Panel, which look at public concerns about research using administrative data, the content of which is both personal and confidential. The ADRN was set up as part of the UK Government’s Big Data initiative as a UK-wide partnership between universities, government bodies, national statistics authorities and the wider research community.

The next ADRN presentation within this session will outline their application process and the role of the Approvals Panel in relation to ethical review. The aim is “to expand the discussion towards a broader reflection on the ethical dilemmas that administrative data pose”, as well as present some steps taken to address these difficulties.

NSD will then present the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), recently adopted at EU level, and explain how it will affect data collection, data use, data preservation and data sharing. If you have been wondering how the regulation will influence the possibilities for processing personal data for research purposes, or how personal data are defined, what conditions apply to an informed consent, or in which cases it is legal and ethical to conduct research without the consent of the data subjects, this presentation is for you.

The big picture

Wednesday 1 June will kick-off with a plenary entitled “Data for decision-makers: Old practice - new challenges” by Gudmund Hernes, the current president of the International Social Science Council and Norway’s former Minister of Education and Research 1990-95, and Minister of Health 1995-97.

The third day of the conference (2 June) will begin with a plenary - “Embracing the ‘Data Revolution’: Opportunities and Challenges for Research’ or ‘What you need to know about the data landscape to keep up to date”, by Matthew Woollard, Director of the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex and Director of the UK Data Service.

If you want to know more about the three European projects under the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission that CESSDA is involved in, one on big data (Big Data Europe - Empowering Communities with Data Technologies), another on - strengthening and widening the European infrastructure for social science data archives (CESSDA SaW) and a third on synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS), this panel is for you.  

"Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game": Strategies for Discussing and Communicating Data Services” considers how libraries might strategically reconsider communications about data services.

Keep an eye on this blog for more news in the run-up to IASSIST2016.

Find out more on the IASSIST2016 website.

Spread the word on Twitter using #IASSIST16.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Bergen! 


A story by Eleanor Smith (CESSDA)

2016 IASSIST Fellowships

The IASSIST Fellows Committee are pleased to announce that we will be awarding an IASSIST Fellowship award for the 2016 conference to the following recipients:

Marijana Glavica - Systems Librarian, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia

'As a systems librarian I work with bibliographic data and manage library automation systems. I am also involved in designing library policies and procedures. As a subject specialist I provide information services to psychology professors and students, and I teach a course about information resources in psychology. In the last few years I started to work towards establishment of data archive and services for the social sciences in Croatia, an effort supported by SERSCIDA project in the past and currently by two ongoing projects - SEEDS and CESSDA-SaW.'

Dr Bhojaraju Gunjal - Head of Central Library, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India

'I am serving as Head, Central Library (Deputy Librarian) of our institute library since August, 2014. In this capacity, I am responsible for management of the Biju Patnaik Central Library of this institute which employs 33 people including library staff, trainees, support staff and has an annual budget of over Rs. 6 Crores.

Our library manages institutional repositories using the DSpace and e-Prints tools with a number of new initiatives  under progress such as integrating ORCID with all our repositories, research data management, etc.  In this regard, programs like IASSIST will definitely help in managing our data repositories in much more effective way.

The library also provides special services by implementing state-of-the-art technologies in various initiatives such as Research data management, Liaison Program, Migration of library software to Open Source tools, Integration of Bio-metric with RFID, Mobile Apps including SMS/email alerts, QR Code, Knowledge Management aspects, Discovery Services, etc. for our library.

I will use this acquired knowledge through the Fellows program for the development of our library data repositories in developing, supporting and managing data infrastructures for our users and help other fellow colleagues in implementing the same in other libraries of India.'

Shima Moradisomehsaraei - Lecturer, Tehran Medical University & Azad University, Iran

'I teach information science and Information technology related courses to library , Medical Information system and Medical bioinformatic students. This means I teach students on how to use softwares to manage,correct and analysis data and how to design models and graphs. Teaching on the "indexing and retrieving" course we work on big data and linked data issues. I also teach on another related course "medical information systems" which I discusses big data and how it influences medical data of the whole society.'

Ya-Chi Lin, Data Specialist, Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

'Our institution, Survey Research Data Archive (SRDA) is an electronic library of the largest collection of digital data in social sciences in Taiwan. Part of my work entails is to promote SRDA and help SRDA members to use data to conduct secondary data analysis. I go to the campus and launch webinars to introduce the academic survey data and government survey data, and the enquiry service of SRDA to potential users.'

We would like to welcome our fellows into the IASSIST community and we're sure that they'll be made to feel at home by all IASSIST members at our forthcoming conference in Bergen, Norway.

Stuart Macdonald & Florio Arguillas (Chairs of IASSIST Fellows Committee)

IASSIST election results, 2015

Hello IASSISTers!

Here are the official results of the 2015 IASSIST elections.  There was a 61% voter turnout.  The winning candidates are:

President: Tuomas Alaterä

Vice President: Jen Green

Secretary: Ryan Womack

Africa Regional Secretary: Lynn Woolfrey

Asia-Pacific Regional  Secretary: Sam Spencer

Canada Regional Secretary: Carol Perry

Europe Regional Secretary: David Schiller

USA Regional Secretary: San Cannon

AC Member, Canada: Berenica Vejvoda

AC Members, Europe: Oliver Watteler and Arne Wolters

AC Members, USA: Kate McNeill, Jen Darragh, and Ashley Jester

Many, many thanks to all candidates who agreed to stand, and congratulations to our new officers.  Newly elected officers’ terms officially begin at the end of the Annual Business Meeting of the Association at the 41st Annual IASSIST conference in Minneapolis, but they are welcome to attend the Administrative Committee meeting preceding the conference as observers if they so wish.

Melanie Wright

Chair, IASSIST Nominations and Elections Committee

  • IASSIST Quarterly

    Publications Special issue: A pioneer data librarian
    Welcome to the special volume of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ (37):1-4, 2013). This special issue started as exchange of ideas between Libbie Stephenson and Margaret Adams to collect

    more...

  • Resources

    Resources

    A space for IASSIST members to share professional resources useful to them in their daily work. Also the IASSIST Jobs Repository for an archive of data-related position descriptions. more...

  • community

    • LinkedIn
    • Facebook
    • Twitter

    Find out what IASSISTers are doing in the field and explore other avenues of presentation, communication and discussion via social networking and related online social spaces. more...
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