View this email in your browser

Monthly Roundup - September 2021

• Princeton University is joining the DCN as a sustaining member in October 2021! DCN Representative Wind Cowles will introduce the two new curators to the listserv as soon as we onboard them later this month!

• Tim McGeary is chairing the inaugural Advisory Board and he invited DCN Director Lisa Johnston to their first meeting held on September 21st to introduce our community and gather questions from the board. Link to notes.

• Governance Board met on September 14th. Link to notes.

• On September 21st, Melissa Cragin gave a presentation to the DCN titled: “Anticipating Public Access policy updates for US Federally funded research: What’s needed to inform the research community on NSF PAR 2.0?” which was followed by a great discussion!

• On September 24th the DCN hosted an information exchange session featuring presentations by Jennifer Moore (WashU), Leslie Kirsch (Michael J Fox Foundation) and Shanda Hunt (Minnesota) on their approaches to data curation.

• The DCN hit 250 dataset submissions!

Big Data

The Big Data Interest group is planning to meet the first week in November. All interested curators and representatives are welcome. Please reach out to Erin Clary (erin.clary@engagedri.ca) and Wendy Kozlowski (wak57@cornell.edu) with questions.

Education

The DCN Education Committee will be opening to new members in October! Please fill out this form to express your interest in joining us. There will be options for how you may wish to participate in committee work. We welcome your participation!

The IMLS grant is on schedule to wrap-up around the end of the year. Project participants are working with an instructional designer, Amanda Albert of Washington University in St.Louis, to transform the 2-day workshop into online educational content that will be housed in Github. We plan to share the modules for DCN review in the next few months. Hannah Hadley will also be leaving Penn State on October 14th to take a position at Princeton. Briana Ezray Wham will become the new PI for the completion of this project.

End User Satisfaction

The End User Satisfaction SIG published a blog post, “Depositor satisfaction with curation services: preliminary results” and has finalized the data we collected for submission to the Data Repository for University of Minnesota (DRUM), so the data should soon be available for download.

Human Participants

The Human Participants interest group is on hiatus. They’re thinking about how to engage the broader community and are open to new ideas!

Institutional Outreach & Communications

The Institutional Outreach and Communications Interest Group in collaboration with the End User Satisfaction SIG is planning the development of promotional materials (i.e., infographics, etc.) including results from the end user survey to communicate the value of curation both locally at our institutions as well as through the DCN. We are also exploring questions for follow-up interviews to collect and share stories from our users.

Racial Justice

Following our presentation at the All Hands meeting the Racial Justice group met in August and discussed some next steps that focused mainly on splitting up this work into two groups. First a DEI committee (using the new governance structure of the DCN) that can focus on diversity, equity and inclusion issues within the DCN as an organization. And second an Equitable Data Practice Special Interest Group that would be open to non-DCN member participation. We welcome your feedback on this approach.

Value of Curation

The Value of Curation group met frequently over the summer to draft a paper on our findings that is near completion. We also released a public access version of our dataset and added a webpage for this research to the DCN website. https://datacurationnetwork.org/value-of-curation/

Monthly Reporting

New Submissions

DCN-280: 1D SAXS Indexing Macro for Igor Pro, a materials science and chemical engineering code dataset, was submitted by Wanda Marsolek for Minnesota and curated by Seth Erickson for Penn State.

DCN-281: Wigner-Seitz Cell Generation and Calculations in Matlab, a materials science and chemical engineering code (MATLAB) dataset, was submitted by Wanda Marsolek for Minnesota and is being curated by Susan Borda for Michigan.

DCN-282: Unbiased inference of the fitness landscape ruggedness from imprecise fitness estimates (Song_Unbiasedinference_rf55z798h), an ecology and evolutionary biology simulation dataset, was submitted by Rachel Woodbrook for Michigan and curated by Jordan Wrigley for Colorado.

DCN-283: Femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy – guided library mining leads to efficient singlet fission in rubrene derivatives, a chemistry microscopy dataset, was submitted by Katie Barrick for Minnesota and curated by Xuying Xin for Penn State.

Resolved Datasets

DCN-263: Canadian Cordillera Fault Gouge XRD and isotopes (Lynch_CanadianCordillera_tt44pn145), an earth sciences mass spec analysis (tabular) dataset, was submitted by Rachel Woodbrook for Michigan and curated by Xuying Xin for Penn State. Xuying made the following recommendations to the researcher: that the contextual information about the dataset from the report file and the metadata record be combined, that the associated manuscript be included with the dataset to provide information about the methodology, that descriptions should be added to the tabular data columns, that they explain why certain sample files were missing from the file list and finally she asked if there were any images files for the x-ray diffraction data. Rachel recently closed this dataset and reported that due to Xuying's expertise major curation actions were taken.