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A space for IASSIST members to share professional resources useful to them in their daily work.

New and Noteworthy

Data Sources Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center
Amy West on 2011-11-23 09:19
policies, preservation, resources, standards, Data Sources

The Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center gathers freely available web-based resources about the preservation of geospatial information. A variety of selected resources are being added, including reports, presentations, standards, and information about tools for preparing geospatial assets for long-term access and use. The resources are indexed to enable searching of titles and are categorized to facilitate discovery by choosing among topics, resource types, or both.

The Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center is a project of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), which is working with a national network of partners on a strategy for preserving digital information for use in the future. Information about the NDIIPP, its partners, projects, and events can be found on the NDIIPP web site, which is accessible at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/

Resource types currently include:

  • Applications: For Download
  • Applications: Online
  • Community blogs and forums
  • Online Journal Articles
  • Presentations
  • Real-World Examples
  • Reports
  • Standards
  • Tutorials and Learning Resources
  • Websites

There are too many categories of content to list here, but it's worth noting that the home page highlights education resources, policy resources and applications. 

For any institution wishing to develop a geospatial preservation program, this site seems like an excellent place to start preparing.

Data Management and Curation UK Data Archive's Managing and Sharing Data Training Resources
Amy West on 2011-11-01 11:08
Data Management and Curation, Education

Our Managing and Sharing Data: Training Resources present a suite of flexible training materials for people who are charged with training researchers and research support staff in how to look after research data.

The Training Resources are modularised following the UK Data Archive's seven key areas of managing and sharing data:

  • sharing data - why and how
  • data management planning for researchers and research centres
  • documenting data
  • formatting data
  • storing data, including data security, data transfer, encryption, and file sharing
  • ethics and consent
  • data copyright

Each section contains:

  • introductory powerpoint(s)
  • presenter's guide - where necessary
  • exercises and introduction to exercises
  • quizzes
  • answers

The materials are presented as used in our own training courses  and are mostly geared towards social scientists.

You can download individual modules from the relevant sections or download the whole resource in pdf format.

Data Management and Curation Research Data Management Training online course
robin on 2011-10-26 02:58
ArcGIS, Best practices, data handling skills, Data Management and Curation, NVivo, R, SPSS, training, Education, Understanding researcher practices

The Research Data Management Training, or MANTRA project has produced an open, online training course for PhD and early career researchers to learn best practices in data management.

In addition to the interactive, online module which covers data management topics such as Organising Your Data, there are downloadable software modules covering data handling skills in SPSS, R, NVivo and ArcGIS.

The resource was created by EDINA and Data Library, University of Edinburgh, and was funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme.

Tools and Apps Podcast about "Numeric data services and sources for the general reference librarian" by Lynda Kellam & Katharin Peter
Amy West on 2011-10-06 08:35
Tools and Apps

Lynda Kellam & Katharin Peter, two IASSIST members, recently published their book on how to be a data librarian:

Kellam, L. M., & Peter, K. (2011). Numeric data services and sources for the general reference librarian. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. 

Earlier this summer, Lynda discussed the book, data, data literacy and instruction with the folks at "Adventures in Library Instruction".

Highly recommended!

Data Sources Kenya Open Data
Amy West on 2011-07-21 11:43
rss, socrata, sub-national, visualization, widgets, Data Sources

Recently Kenya launched Kenya Open Data, a portal to national and sub-national data by and/or about the nation of Kenya. The site runs on a tool called Socrata boasts a host of really nice features including:

The site also contains links to other data platforms such as Google Public Data Explorer.

Access is freely available with a request for attribution according to the Terms and Conditions.

The US site, http://www.data.gov also runs on Socrata. What's interesting to me is how few of the Socrata features are used on Data.gov as opposed to Kenya Open Data. Kenya's implementation is really impressive.

I look forward to using this resource and am very glad that it's makes so much data, especially sub-national data, readily available to me here in the middle of the US!

  • Iassist Quarterly

    Publications

    Sharing data and building information

    With this issue (volume 35-3, 2011) of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ) we return to the regular format of a collection of articles not within the same specialist subject area as we have seen in recent special issues of IQ. Naturally...
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