My reply to the "Public Access to Digital Data" RFI

Here it is.  I wish I had more time to be comprehensive, but this is what I had time to write.  Better this than nothing.

Hello Ted Wackler,

I am writing to the OSTP office concerning the “Request for Information: Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research” that is available at http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28621/request-for-information-public-access-to-digital-data-resulting-from-federally-funded-scientific.

I will put in my comments after the numbered sections below. 

Preservation, Discoverability, and Access 

(1) What specific Federal policies would encourage public access to and the preservation of broadly valuable digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research, to grow the U.S. economy and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise?

I would like to see PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) include more data as well as journal articles.  With the new NSF data management plan requirements, research done with NSF funds could copy the data to an NSF repository.  I would also like to see expanded roles for NTIS and the DOE Information Bridge in holding more data from research.  I know that NTIS often sells their reports, but it would be better if the reports and data were freely available to the general public. Astronomical data could be held at the NASA ADS with greater Federal support, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/index.html

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders, with respect to any existing or proposed policies for encouraging public access to and preservation of digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research?

Where applicable, I would recommend that Federally funded research license their material with a CC by license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) or CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).  This will provide the widest reach to readers throughout the whole world.  This will also have the most benefit for scientists, federal agencies, the readers and the citizens of the United States.  It may not be as beneficial for commercial publishers, but they have plenty of other non-government sponsored material they can publish. 

(3) How could Federal agencies take into account inherent differences between scientific disciplines and different types of digital data when developing policies on the management of data?

There are many different data types.  The Global Change Master Directory provides recommendations to scientists who deposit data to the directory.  They provide guides to their metadata writers (Directory Interchange Format (DIF) Writer's Guide). See http://gcmd.nasa.gov/User/difguide/WRITEADIF.pdf and http://gcmd.nasa.gov/User/difguide/difman.html.  This guide could be used as a template to help data management writers describe datasets in other disciplines.

The Digital Curation Centre is another good resource to consult, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/data-management-plans. This is another good resource, “National initiatives for promoting data management strategies: an overview,” http://sonexworkgroup.blogspot.com/2011/04/national-initiatives-for-promoting-data.html

(4) How could agency policies consider differences in the relative costs and benefits of long-term stewardship and dissemination of different types of data resulting from federally funded research?

It depends on who needs to use that data, and the intended audience of the research.

(5) How can stakeholders (e.g., research communities, universities, research institutions, libraries, scientific publishers) best contribute to the implementation of data management plans?

There are many librarians who are getting to be a lot more familiar with data management plans and e-science.  I would recommend that the government work with university programs such as those listed at http://www.arl.org/rtl/eresearch/escien/nsf/nsfresources.shtml.

(6) How could funding mechanisms be improved to better address the real costs of preserving and making digital data accessible?

I am not sure.

(7) What approaches could agencies take to measure, verify, and improve compliance with Federal data stewardship and access policies for scientific research? How can the burden of compliance and verification be minimized?

Scientists need positive reinforcement for depositing and describing their data.  If they received more grant funding for cooperating in projects, or if they received greater recognition by university administrators, then that would be some positive rewards for compliance.

(8) What additional steps could agencies take to stimulate innovative use of publicly accessible research data in new and existing markets and industries to create jobs and grow the economy?

There are always more mashups that could be done with GIS data and social science data.

(9) What mechanisms could be developed to assure that those who produced the data are given appropriate attribution and credit when secondary results are reported?

Data sets could be given a permanent citation link, such as a DOI. http://www.doi.org/ I would recommend that you read some of the papers presented at this conference, http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/brdi/PGA_064019 “Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: An International Symposium and Workshop”

Standards for Interoperability, Re-Use and Re-Purposing

(10) What digital data standards would enable interoperability, reuse, and repurposing of digital scientific data? For example, MIAME (minimum information about a microarray experiment; see Brazma et al., 2001, Nature Genetics 29, 371) is an example of a community-driven data standards effort.

This chapter might be of use to you. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK45678/ “The Current State of Data Integration in Science” found in the book, Steps Toward Large-Scale Data Integration in the Sciences: Summary of a Workshop. National Research Council (US) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12916

(11) What are other examples of standards development processes that were successful in producing effective standards and what characteristics of the process made these efforts successful?

I can’t find any right now.

(12) How could Federal agencies promote effective coordination on digital data standards with other nations and international communities?

Start with one country, and then start working with other countries.  I’d recommend that you take a look at the policies of the United Kingdom. Consider looking at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/policy-and-legal/policy-tools-and-guidance and http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/establishing-a-digital-preservation-policy/.

(13) What policies, practices, and standards are needed to support linking between publications and associated data?

I would recommend that you take a look at this article, http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0021101 for some practices that are used.

My library day

This should be a short little piece about #libday7.  I've taken part in #libday in the past, but only back to Libday4.

On Monday, July the 25th, I got into work a little late, since I needed to drop my 11 year old kid off at a summer camp.  It is just a week long camp at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center.  He is learning about comedy and improvisation.

Of course, email is the first thing that I slog through, and I had a lot of it to slog through.  I was off work last Thursday afternoon and Friday.  (We went out camping with the Boy Scout Troop at the Wilderness on Wheels camp about an hour SW of here.  One of the kids designed a bench [we helped him build it] and ran a fishing and camping workshop as an eagle scout project.)  Over the weekend, I read some of the more important messages, but I left the non-essential messages till Monday.

Soooooooo, here are some of the topics of emails that I responded to.

• I let the reference faculty and staff know that the new interface of the Web of Knowedge (WoK) doesn't work very well with IE9.
• Last week, we changed all of the URLs for the databases we have in the WoK interface except for the Journal Citation Reports which hold the impact factor data.  I requested that someone from our E-Resources team change that URL as well.
• The Penrose Library is going through a huge renovation project.  I tweeted a little bit (from the Penrose Library account) about the fact that a big fence is going around the old library on Tuesday the 26th.
• I received the final signed version of the Governing Document for the Sci-Tech Division of SLA.  I posted the document on the DST website the following day.
• I worked with some people concerning an article that was submitted to the journal, Collaborative Librarianship. This took quite a bit of time to get resolved, with many emails back and forth.  I also write small blog posts for Collaborative Librarianship News.  I didn't write anything on Monday, but I did on Tuesday.  We now have over 500 blog posts!
• Got an email concerning the Handheld Librarian Conference (which is going on as I write), but I have too much other work to do today to register for it. (Such as: finish this blog post; work on an article for the Sci-Tech News; begin work on a section of the Reference Department Annual Report; continue work on an article concerning Open Access Resources with a colleague in Egypt.)
• I registered for a webinar concerning the Mendeley service on Tuesday. The presentation was captured on YouTube.  (Read that Beth also attended!)
• Saw this announcement about a free online conference, Library 2.011, and I might try to present something at it.
• I also marked three items in my delicious account.  They were: Social media find place in classroom - USATODAY.com; British Research Libraries Say No to ‘Big Deal’ Serials Packages - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education; and The Future of Universities and Their Libraries - Committee Report - June 2011 | ALA Connect
• Investigate a problem with the footer of the library website.
• Swap a consultation shift with a colleague.

After lunch, I listened to some of this online workshop session concerning how our admissions office is using social media to interact with prospective and new students.  I often attend the WebEd workshops in person, but I didn't today.

During the rest of the afternoon, I worked as a peer reviewer for the journal, Practical Academic Librarianship.  This is a great new journal from the Academic Division of SLA.  I read most of the paper last week, but it took me a little while to write the reviewers report concerning the article that was assigned to me.  This is the first time that I have been a peer reviewer for a journal, so I wasn't sure how much feedback to provide, so it took me a while to write out my response and thoughts about the article.

That was pretty much my day.  Exciting, huh.

Review of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the etc., etc., etc.

Here is the whole title of the book.

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Some of the book can also be found on Google Books.

If the higher education system changes as much as the author thinks it will, then it will have many implications for academic libraries. Lots of people and organizations are trying to predict the future of academic libraries.

The basic premise of the book is that the internet and alternative educational institutions are providing new and different ways for people to learn.

She (the author, Anya Kamenetz) noted that one of the problems with the higher ed system is that students are treated differently once they transition from high school to college. If high school students are having difficulty passing classes, the teacher or the school is held responsible. If one of those students is having difficulty passing college classes, then the student is blamed. In short, some/many colleges and higher ed institutions do not take [as] much responsibility for helping their students finish their studies. There is not as much accountability for high ed institutions. She also describes a system where colleges are incentivized to increase costs and services to students. If a college costs more money, then it must be a better institution.

Here is the part where I start talking about libraries.

I found the word library mentioned just once in the book, and it was about the Europeana project. The word library isn't even in the index. The free Internet is OK for learning some things, but it takes an institution to provide a well stocked library of resources so students don't have to shell out money (to buy or travel to find) books and journal articles and newspaper archives and conference materials and government documents and microfilms and lots of other stuff. She also doesn't seem to get there is a much bigger and deeper web of Internet materials that are not freely available to students, unless institutions subscribe of course. It also takes an institution to provide laboratory space for students in the sciences. Doing a chemistry experiment on the computer just isn't the same thing as dealing with real chemicals in the lab. It takes an institution to provide places for students to gather for clubs and other interest groups.

David Wiley of BYU (and Flat World Knowledge) shows up on page 83 and notes that "if universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020." (He is also a leader of the open-education movement.) People are thinking the same thing about libraries. They think we need to either innovate or we will be dead. Ummm, I don't think so. People have been saying for the last 15 years that the Internet is going to make libraries obsolete, but here we are. If anything, we are working harder than ever to help our students navigate the complex and evolving information sphere.

The book covers a lot of open education and open access resources. For example, they mention DOAJ on page 85. Libraries are certainly behind initiatives like this.

I did find some of her writing confusing. For example, she seemed to confuse credits with classes in some spots. This article at Inside Higher Ed does a great job of evaluating much of her logic and false assumptions.

On page 88, she provided the wrong title for this article, "Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0." The PDF is here. Instead of reading the book, this article provides a good overview of the open education movement.

I did learn about a lot of new and interesting initiatives that are going on.

• Open Learning Initiative at CMU
• I knew about MIT and their OpenCourseWare Project, but this is part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium
• I've known about the term "personal learning network" for a year or two. Here are some resources to get more information on that topic.
• The School of Everything
• "AcaWiki is like a 'Wikipedia for academic research' designed to increase the impact of scholars, students, and bloggers by enabling them to share summaries and discuss academic papers online."
• "Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses."
• "University of the People (UoPeople) is the world’s first tuition-free online university."
• Hacking Education event in NYC.

Overall, it was an interesting book. However, she seemed to miss the point that a lot of the education one receives at an institution is not just from taking course and reading the readings, it is from the socialization process. This is very important for younger undergraduate students, but graduate students also learn about their field by socializing with other graduate students, and from learning how their faculty mentors do research. The institution provides the "personal learning network" all in one place for the students, and they get an official certification (degree, or whatever you want to call it) of their learning. For edupunks, they might be able to build great personal learning networks and be able to learn about the topics they desire, but they may not have the same kind of certification. This may not matter as much in some fields of inquiry, but it matters quite a bit in other fields. I'd rather not go to a dentist who learned about dentistry on the open web. I'd rather not hire a lawyer who didn't have a law degree. I wouldn't trust a research article in biology, if the author didn't have a biology degree.

CoALL / RMSLA brown bag on Wednesday, Sept. 29

I went to a brown bag talk and lunch last week. We talked about cool, little unknown libraries in the Denver area. Here are some of the libraries we talked about...

• Office of Surface Mining Technical Library
• Water Resources Data System Library in Wyoming
• While this is not really a library, the Colorado Geological Survey sells many maps and other items at their main office.
• Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information
• Western History and Genealogy Collection at DPL
• Colorado Supreme Court Library
• Colorado State Archives provides an excellent library
• University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Library
• Bureau of Land Management Library
• Dept of Interior Libraries, such as the Bureau of Reclamation Library?
• CSU Water Resources Archive
• National Enforcement Investigations Center (NEIC) Environmental Forensic Library
• National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Library
• I talked a little bit about visitor access to the Penrose Library with a referral card and a pass
• http://www.askacademic.org/
• Helen Fowler Library at Denver Botanic Gardens
• Bailey Library at the DMNS
  
• There is a list of many special libraries in Colorado on the Dept. of Education Website
• http://creatingcommunities.denverlibrary.org/
• http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/

We also talked about what was great about each library, but I just wanted to remember which libraries we talked about. I figure I can now go back later and investigate their websites and resources to see what they have.

Visit to three Baltimore libraries

On Monday, September the 2oth, I had the opportunity to visit three Baltimore libraries. I was in town for a publisher's meeting, and they let us out early. So, I figured I would see some of the libraries in the area. I mapped out three. They are pretty much a straight shot up Charles St.

The first library I stopped at was the Enoch Pratt Free Library. I had to walk about 6-7 blocks to get there. What an amazing structure. The main hall was something to behold. There are some pictures posted on their Flickr site, but none of the individual pictures do the entire hall justice. Once you get into the reference areas or in the stacks, it looked like the carpet could use some vacuuming, but that is not such a big deal. The children's area was a little hard to find. One has to weave their way down the stairs to get to the children's area. What an amazing area -- well worth the trip. The fountain is really cool.

The next library is north another 7 blocks north. I walked to the University of Baltimore Langsdale Library. I simply walked in the front door. They did have a security guard on the main level. She never questioned me. Maybe I looked nice. Since I am a science and engineering librarian, I tend to gravitate to the science areas of the stacks. I was a little surprised to find only 3 shelves of astronomy books and only 7 shelves of physics books. Hummm. Now that I look at the departments available in the College of Arts and Sciences, I see that they do not offer much in the way of physics, astronomy or mathematics. That explains it. Had I looked in a different area, I probably would have found lots more books. It is also good to see that their libraries are keeping up by attending conferences. I wish I could have attended this one. I was not able to get free wifi while on campus. I also stopped by their newish student center. I also learned that the U of Baltimore is part of the University of Maryland system. I thought it was private, but it isn't.

The third and last library is another 20 blocks to the north, the Eisenhower Library (of the Sheridan Libraries) at Johns Hopkins University. I took a cab from Penn station. The security guard took my drivers license to make a photocopy before she would let me in. The place was packed. They have resources that I have only heard about and never seen. For example, they have the Science of Synthesis in print in their reference section. They also have quite a bit of LB, but it is hard to tell if they are getting current volumes or not. I did not check to see if they have online access to either of these. There is a reason that JHU is highly ranked in the ARL. They can spend the money on resources such as these. They are also building the new Brody Learning Commons area.

Once I was done visiting the Eisenhower library, I stopped by their book store, which is a Barnes and Noble just off campus. Not very exciting. I thought about getting a lacrosse hat or a t-shirt, but I'm not really Hopkins material. That, and I am not really a lacrosse fan, but I do know that they are known for that sport.

Ate dinner at the neighborhood Subway, and then I headed back to the hotel. Overall, it was a good trip visiting three Baltimore libraries.

Library Day in the Life Project

Yup, I signed up for it. Now, I just have to remember to record some/most/all of my day on January 25th. That should be a pretty typical workday for me. What the heck am I talking about? Bobbi Newman is the inspiration...

Handheld Librarian virtual conference

I will be attending the Handheld Librarian conference tomorrow. If you are attending, maybe you could win a door prize? Go ahead and enter here. They will also be tracking delicious tags and tweets concerning the event. Use #hhlib. Thanks to Luke for the info.

Videos on the future of libraries

While I know about quite a number of websites and reports (see these blog posts from John Dupuis, this LISNews report, this PLoS article, this ARL report, this book, these ACRL reports, and the Darien Statements) that are about the future of libraries and other information services, I recently learned about some new videos that are about the future of libraries.

• Betsy Wilson's Crystal Ball: New Directions for Libraries (Crystal Ball Gazing: New Directions for Research Libraries Tuesday, October 16; 8:30-10:00; Morrison Library, University of California, Berkeley)

• New Directions: Imperatives Defining the Future Relevance and Impact of the Academic Research Library -- by Jim Neal (James Neal is the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University in New York City, providing leadership for university academic computing and a system of 25 libraries.)

• New Directions -- by Peter Brantley. (He is the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, a not-for-profit international association of libraries and allied institutions. He has served as the Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, New York University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF.)

• We can't forget about students... Take a look at a vision of students today -- by Michael Wesch (This summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.)

• The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age. This took place at Texas A&M University, February 11-13, 2009. A bunch of the videos and reports are relevant.

How the Penrose Library is using SNS tools

I was on a panel yesterday with a bunch of other great librarians. It was the spring workshop of the Colorado Association of Special Libraries (CoASL), a division of CAL. Some of the slides at the workshop are posted at the event page of Slideshare. Below is my presentation.

Social Networking and the Penrose Library

View more presentations from jokrausdu.

Wish I could have stayed for the whole day, but I HAD to go to the dentist...

Visited an EPA Library, Region 8 in Denver

Went to a presentation at the EPA Office in Denver today (Region 8). The presenter, David Selden, posted his slides from the talk on "Libraries and Environmental Sustainability" right here. David is a librarian at the Native American Rights Fund Library in Boulder, CO.

Here are the basics from his slides:

• Global Warming or None like it hot video from Futurama
• The Hockey stick chart.
• Per capita carbon emission chart showing the US is horrible compared to the rest of the world's countries.
• By 2050, we should try to be 80% below our 1990 levels in CO2 emission.
• 80% of glaciers will be gone by 2035.
• The oceans will rise 1 meter over the next century. Shows what it will do to Florida.
• The Pika is threatened.

He provided some data showing how much CO2 emissions come from various activities like driving and flying. Some data can be found at Carbonfund.org, but these numbers do not match David's numbers precisely.The Building is a LEED Gold Standard building, and we saw some of it with a tour. Particularly interesting was the Green Roof at the top of the building. I also really liked the sails used at the top of the building to redirect light from the skylights to the lower levels.

We also went into the Library on the 2nd floor which is available to the public from 8am-4pm. I wish I could have taken pictures, but they don't allow that in the EPA building. It was pretty cool. I did get an EPA tatoo. Here is some documentation I grabbed. Overall, I really enjoyed visiting the EPA Region 8 library.