Our thanks to Dan Kipnis for submitting the following summary of the Data Curation program.
Recently, the NIH’s Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) formed a Data and Informatics Working Group (DIWG). The DIWG will be “providing the ACD and the NIH Director with expert advice on the management, integration, and analysis of large biomedical datasets.”[1]
This new attention from the NIH, along with the NSF’s requirement that grants include a data management plan, means that the future of data sets and managing them has become paramount for many information professionals.
Acting on these recent developments, the Philadelphia Regional Chapter of the Medical Library Association sponsored a continuing education program with two speakers who are leading the charge for managing data curation. On Friday March 16, 2012, at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Patricia Hswe, Digital Collections Curator at Penn State University Libraries, and Yasmeen Shorish, Assistant Professor and Science Librarian at James Madison University, presented their experience with data curation at their respective institutions.
Patricia’s presentation, “Data Curation in a Research Library: A Start-Up Story,” outlined the differences between data curation and digital curation, the modeling data lifecycle, and workflows.
Yasmeen’s presentation, “Wading into the Data Pool: Engaging with Data Management Without Drowning… Hopefully,” introduced issues of documentation and organization, the DMPTool, and areas of data engagement on campus.
The program was recorded and is archived in the Jefferson Digital Commons at: http://jdc.jefferson.edu/data_curation/2012/March16/1/ . At that link, you can also access the handout, which lists relevant resources for enlightening you on how information professionals can work with researchers and their data sets.
[1] Working Group on Data and Informatics. NIH. http://acd.od.nih.gov/diwg.htm . Retrieved May 10, 2012
This event was funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHS-N-276-2011-00003-C with the University of Pittsburgh, Health Sciences Library System.
Note: In April, our MLA-Phil Government Relations Committee also posted a brief comment about the DIWG and MLA’s interaction with them.


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