Data Services Committee
Meeting Minutes
Monday, August 22, 2011
11-12:00
ATLAS Conference Room
608 S. Mathews Urbana
Members:
x Merinda Hensley
x Karen Hogenboom, chair
□ Jenny Johnson
x Lura Joseph
x Dawn Owens-Nicholson
x Carissa Phillips
□ Sarah Shreeves
x Sarah Williams
x Maryalice Wu
1. Introductions: how are you working with data and issues surrounding data? i.e., helping users
or working on data archiving? Researcher-generated data or published data?
2. Quick review of committee charge and what we are doing in each area
Our primary focus right now is on documentation standards.
3. Metadata project next steps. If you want some general background, see chapters 8-13 in
http://www.library.illinois.edu/dcc/bestpractices/contents.html for some local advice from the
Digital Content Creation unit in the library.
Our conclusion about DDI format for metadata is that it is too detailed and complicated for our
purposes. We will start from the locally developed best practices linked above and subgroups of
the committee will take on sections of metadata as follows:
Descriptive: Jenny and Lura
Technical: Dawn and Sarah W (with Eric Johnson as a resource)
Preservation: Sarah S and Merinda
Administrative: Maryalice and Karen
Carissa will be an extra pair of eyes on all of these, to make sure that necessary metadata
elements are not missed because they overlap between categories. The existing best practices
are aimed at scanning projects, so our task is to decide what metadata elements are necessary
for data in addition to what is described in the existing best practices.
4. Updates
a. Year of Data Stewardship (Sarah)
There is an opening symposium on September 27. Sarah S will forward a link
to details as soon as one is available.
b. 2011 data purchase program
We haven’t gotten any applications yet, but there have been several
inquiries
c. Data services website
The site is being converted to a Delicious feed. Lists of resources will
continue to appear as they do now, but there will also be a tag cloud with
subject or format tags so that users do not have to scan long lists of links to
find what they need. Karen, Lura and Sarah W. will meet to talk about the
scope of this site and how it complements the sites they will develop.
d. collections issues
i. Conversation with Proquest Datasets developer about uploading data
This may be an elegant solution for the data that we purchase for
campus access. Discussions continue.
ii. SimplyMap: who is using it?
Maryalice is hoping to use SimplyMap with 100-level courses in
Global Studies and Geography this fall. I3 could be approached about
contributing. ATLAS uses Mapviewer as well, which is an inexpensive
and relatively user-friendly mapping software.