Gillian Elliot, University of Otago Library, New Zealand
A joint initiative between the University of Otago Library and the Life Sciences Departments, in association with the Ecology Teaching Programme, and the Ecology, Conservation and Biodiversity Research Group
Since the 1990s, libraries have adapted to the many, often seismic, changes that have resulted from the rise and rise of the internet. Today the focus, for many university libraries, is increasingly on digitization, expanding the library’s role beyond the traditional (managing published information), to managing their own institutional (largely unpublished) research outputs. Fulltext theses online, Institutional Research Repositories (IRR) and Digital Collections continue to emerge, within most tertiary institutions, at an accelerating rate. However, within New Zealand universities, there is one further ‘paradigmatic shift’, in information sharing, that has yet to be realised – getting down to the ‘data’, the stuff which has the potential to inform all academic research outputs.
The current, 12-month, University of Otago Library feasibility project aims to examine some of the key challenges and potentials of managing, curating and sharing digital and digitized research data from our own academic institution. The Project is ‘wrapped around’ the context of biodiversity or ‘biological diversity of life’. (New Zealand is an internationally recognised ‘biodiversity hotspot’ with a high number of globally unique and threatened species.)
Unlike the institution-wide, holistic approach to information management adopted by institutions such as Monash University, this Otago Library/researcher-driven project has (out of necessity) adopted a ‘bottom up, discipline-specific’ approach. While (arguably) less than ideal, this ground-level approach is already yielding interesting, often unexpected results. Some of the activities of this project will be discussed, including: researcher engagement (through presentations and interviews); researcher response to collaborative data management (qualitative and quantitative data collated through interviews and a formal data management survey) and the Project ‘test case’, using New Zealand expert, Dr Phil Bishop’s ‘frog image collection’, to explore some of the general challenges of managing research data in a digital environment, such as collaborations and workflows, and also the more discipline specific challenges of managing biodiversity research data (taxonomic, geospatial).
This ‘regionally-focused’ Project has already attracted the interest of those currently working with digital biodiversity information, at both the national (NZ) and international level, including: the New Zealand Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST); the Department of Conservation (DOC); Landcare Research and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Presentation (PDF)