SHARE has selected the inaugural cohort of 35 curation associates—library professionals who will participate in a yearlong, “train the trainer,” service-learning program. The SHARE Curation Associates program merges librarians’ interest in furthering their technology competencies with SHARE’s need for expert curation of its free, open data set about research and scholarly activities.
The SHARE technical team is already using automated, machine-learning techniques for cleaning, enhancing, and linking the metadata SHARE is collecting from open repositories and other registries. But even the most sophisticated algorithms need human experts to train and improve them. Through the Curation Associates program, those experts—including digital archivists, institutional repository managers, and metadata professionals—will build technical confidence and learn computational skills that will make curation activities at their local institution more efficient, while improving the value of the SHARE data set for the community.
“The SHARE team was very pleased with both the quantity and quality of the applications we received for this pilot Curation Associates program,” said Tyler Walters, SHARE director and dean of libraries at Virginia Tech. “Through the generous support of library directors for the staff they are sponsoring to participate—both within the Association of Research Libraries and beyond—we are thrilled to expand the cohort size to 35 associates, from our initial target of 20.”
As Sarah Pritchard, dean of libraries at Northwestern University, said of the Curation Associates opportunity, “The whole team at Northwestern University Libraries will benefit—both our librarians’ knowledge in support of faculty data services across the disciplines, and our technologists’ ability to build repositories that interoperate effectively in an emerging national and international context.”
Donald Gilstrap, dean of libraries at the University of Alabama, noted, “The University of Alabama Libraries is expanding its support of campus-wide digital scholarship by increasing digital literacies and implementing an institutional repository. The SHARE competencies will be directly applicable toward achieving these endeavors.”
The SHARE Curation Associates program will be modeled on the Center for Open Science’s (COS) service-learning pedagogical approach to gaining computational skills and “learning how to learn.” Coupling this method with COS’s statistical and replicability training and consulting expertise provides the strong foundation and framework for this project.
Visit the SHARE website for the names and institutional affiliations of the first SHARE Curation Associates cohort. The associates will kick off their participation in the program at the upcoming SHARE Community Meeting scheduled for the week of July 11, 2016, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Contact Judy Ruttenberg (judy@arl.org), program director for SHARE, with questions or for additional information about this program.