UKOLN Informatics Research Group » #idcc13

IDCC13 and the Research Data Alliance

kevin.ashley — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 14:15:34 +0000

I'm currently on my way to Gothenburg for the first plenary meeting of the Research Data Alliance, or RDA as I'll refer to it from here on. It seems an appropriate point to fulfil a promise I made a month ago in my overview of IDCC13. I promised when I wrote that post that I would be writing separately about the pre-conference workshop we ran on the Research Data Alliance. Somewhat belatedly, this is that report.

IDCC13: on reflection

kevin.ashley — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

IDCC13 and its associated workshops took place in Amsterdam a few weeks ago - the first time we've run the International Digital Curation Conference in continental Europe. The increased attendance and enthusiastic involvement of many new colleagues from northern Europe certainly made the move worthwhile for us and we look forward to returning in future years. In this post I'll pick out a few of my personal highlights from the event and also describe the growing amount of conference material, from papers to blog posts, that's available from the DCC site.

IDCC13: Panel on confidentiality and open access to research data

Digital Curation Centre blogs — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 18:09:06 +0000

In his talk at IDCC, Ewan Birney, Associate Director of the EMBL European Informatics Institute, described how the field of genomics has paved the path to large-scale data sharing. The field now publicly confronts the issues arising from breaches to privacy as a result of such sharing. An editorial in Nature titled, “Genetic Privacy,” was published just one day after the January 16 panel at IDCC.

8th International Digital Curation Conference 2013

Jez Cope — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:14:29 +0000

From Monday 14 to Wednesday 16 January 2013, Cathy and I attended the 8th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC13) in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

On Monday morning, we ran a workshop, jointly with Hannah Lloyd-Jones from Open Exeter, entitled “Designing Data Management Training Resources: Tools for the provision of interactive research data management workshops“. This offered participants the opportunity to learn more about the way we run our face-to-face data management training with staff and students, and to experience first-hand some of the interactive exercises we use.

These included Open Exeter’s “Research Data Dating” exercise, in which two concentric circles of participants have 3 minutes to describe their research data to each other before moving on to the next person. I demonstrated how we use “clickers” (audience response systems) to survey our students during face-to-face workshops, and we also had a discussion of the pros and cons of the data management plan (DMP) templates that we’ve used with students.

For more info, take a look at Marieke Guy’s blog post, IDCC13: Exemplar RDM Training Exercises and Jill Evans’s summary of tweets from the workshop. For those who are interested, we used PollEverywhere, a website which permits voting on questions via SMS or the web on a smartphone or laptop.

Update: You can now download Hannah’s slides: Designing Data Management Training Resources: IDCC 2013 Workshop

Cathy Pink presented a practice paper entitled “Meeting the Data Management Compliance Challenge: Funder Expectations and Institutional Reality“. The paper drew together lessons learnt by the Research360 project, based on its experience in meeting the varied data management needs of both an institution and its external stakeholders. The text of Cathy’s paper will be available online soon.

Liz Lyon facilitated the “What is a data scientist?” symposium, an interactive panel discussion around roles and skills required to cope with the growing importance of data in scholarship. See Marieke’s blog post, “IDCC13: What’s in a name? The ‘data scientist’ symposium” for more details.

Finally, we also presented a poster, “Creating an Online Training Module on RDM“, about the process of developing our research data management e-learning module for postgraduate students. The poster was designed and written by our colleague Marieke Guy from UKOLN, and I gave a “minute madness” presentation summarising it as well.

There is also a searchable archive of tweets with the #idcc13 hashtag.

IDCC13: Cloud Services

patrick.mccann — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:33:15 +0000

Immediately before lunch on Wednesday Paul Walk of UKOLN chaired a session titled Cloud Services, in which Dirk von Suchodoletz of the University of Freiburg and David S. H. Rosenthal of the LOCKSS Program presented their papers.

IDCC13: The Power of Intelligence

Marieke Guy — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:10:40 +0000

The second of the 3 themes at this year’s IDCC was Intelligence, explored in a two-talk session chaired by Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). While intelligence and innovation are beginning to drive the data science agenda, from data mining and visualisation to open data and business intelligence, the two talks showed us that it is currently the coordination behind these efforts that remains lacking.

Digital collections: new challenges for curation and new opportunities for data driven scholarship

IDCC13: What’s in a name? The ‘data scientist’ symposium

sarah.jones — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:03:41 +0000

The IDCC symposium this year was on ‘What is a data scientist?’ After some shuffling of chairs, Liz Lyon opened proceedings with a quick show of hands on who thought they were a data engineer, data analyst, data librarian, data steward, data journalist or data publisher? Data librarian and data steward got the biggest response, but would these people call themselves data scientists? Or are there other terms they would use?

IDCC13: ELIXIR – a bioinformatics infrastructure

Alex Ball — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:37:17 +0000

The data used in molecular biology has undergone a massive shift in scale over the last decade. While this opens up many new opportunities, it means that the existing research infrastructure needs an overhaul. In his opening keynote presentation at IDCC 13, Ewan Birney, Associate Director of the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), described the new ELIXIR infrastructure and illustrated why it was needed with examples from his work in genomics.

IDCC13: Bringing people together via DMPs

sarah.jones — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 06:41:20 +0000

The DMP workshop at IDCC brought together speakers from all corners of the globe to pursue the common interest of data management planning. The event was kicked off by Martin Donnelly of the DCC who co-organised it with Carly Strasser from the Californian Digital Library. Martin gave some background context, likening research data management to Hydra, a many-headed beast to be tamed. He explained the development of DMP resources and the DMP Online tool before handing off to the next speakers for a round of policy updates.

IDCC13 Preview: Hans Pfeiffenberger

magdalena.getler — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:06:09 +0000

The 8th International Digital Curation Conference is just around the corner and we are anticipating great discussions about data science when our international audience gather in Amsterdam in January 2013.

In the eighth of our series of preview posts, Hans Pfeiffenberger from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, gives us his insights into some of the current issues...