SHARE News
SHARE Updates | 29 June 2016

SHARE Update, June 2016

In This Issue

Judy Ruttenberg Talks with Library Journal about SHARE

Judy Ruttenberg

In his May 31 Library Journal article, “Green OA and the Interoperability of Institutional Repositories,” John Parsons interviews SHARE Operations Team member Judy Ruttenberg about how SHARE is “mapping the metadata muddle” to facilitate finding related research across repositories. The “green” open access (OA) model is based on authors and researchers archiving their own work in open access repositories, which use a variety of metadata protocols to describe and index their records. Parsons notes, “While many data providers are OAI-PMH compliant, the adherence to this protocol at the individual record level is inconsistent.”

Such inconsistent metadata makes it difficult to find research on a particular topic or by a particular researcher across multiple repositories. However, Parsons says, “That appears to be changing. The SHARE initiative has taken on the challenge of establishing a common set of descriptors, and a common data structure to support them.” Ruttenberg explains that SHARE is harvesting metadata from more than 100 providers—most of which are repositories—to build a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. She says, “At our upcoming Community Meeting, we’ll be launching a new program on shared curation that will involve librarians and data professionals working directly to enhance this metadata. Of course at scale we will need to automate as much as we can with machine learning and statistical data cleaning.”

Ruttenberg is optimistic about SHARE’s future. Given the initiative’s ambitious goal of making research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable in the context of the current “metadata muddle,” she concludes, “SHARE is the kind of challenge we need the entire community to embrace and invest in—in order for it to succeed.”

Read the Library Journal article.

SHARE Community Meeting to Convene in July—Program Online

The program schedule and many session descriptions for the SHARE Community Meeting to be held Wednesday–Thursday, July 13–14, in Charlottesville, Virginia, are now online. The Community Meeting will be preceded by a SHARE Hackathon on Monday–Tuesday, July 11–12.

The Community Meeting goals and objectives are action-oriented—SHARE is looking for tangible opportunities to advance its work of building a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle.

The meeting and hackathon will be held at the Center for Open Science and the Omni Charlottesville Hotel. The organizers have compiled helpful information about the meeting venues, parking, and local restaurants, businesses, and transportation.

The SHARE team is looking forward to seeing many of you in Charlottesville next month!

Virginia Tech Awarded Grant to Study Big Data Management

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded Virginia Tech (VT) University Libraries, in partnership with researchers at VT, a $308,175 National Leadership Grant for Libraries to study and develop recommendations for managing big data—collections so large and complex they must be analyzed computationally. The project team will explore such questions as how and where big data should be stored, who should fund the storage, what kinds of computers are needed to process the data, and how to ensure that the data will be accessible and reusable into the future.

Tyler Walters, dean of the VT University Libraries and founding director of SHARE, is a member of the grant project team. The team also includes Zhiwu Xie, technology development librarian in the University Libraries; Edward Fox, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering; and Pablo Tarazaga, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering. Jiangping Chen, associate professor in the Department of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas, will help evaluate and review the project.

The project team will test the performance of three different data infrastructures that the University Libraries have developed or collaborated on and that members of the team lead: SHARE, the Event Digital Library and Archive, and the Virginia Tech Smart Infrastructure Laboratory. Based on the test results, the team will recommended strategies for other libraries and institutions to use in supporting big data projects. One outcome of the research will be a “data-sharing-and-reuse decision tree,” which will include such elements as data types, storage options, computing needs, financial support, and the skills and knowledge of the people involved.

For more details, see the June 3 Virginia Tech news release about the grant.

Learn More about SHARE

There is a wealth of resources to help you better comprehend and communicate the ins and outs of SHARE as we build a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle:

  • Flyer about SHARE—to help you spread the word about the growing SHARE data set and the opportunity to register for SHARE Notify. Please reproduce and distribute this flyer on your campus or at meetings you attend.
  • FAQ about SHARE Notify Beta—If you have questions about the SHARE Notify beta, such as, “How do I subscribe to SHARE notifications?” or “How do I filter my SHARE search results by institution?”, visit the FAQ for answers. Submit additional questions to info@www.share-research.org.
  • SHARE Knowledge Base—provides short, non-technical answers to key SHARE questions ranging from “Who is behind SHARE?” to “What is SHARE doing about data?” If you or someone on your campus has a practical or conceptual question about SHARE, the Knowledge Base is likely to have your answer.
  • EDUCAUSE Review article on SHARE—Tyler Walters and Judy Ruttenberg describe SHARE’s first project, the SHARE Notification Service (now called SHARE Notify), as well as the other three layers of SHARE that will be developed in tandem with the Notification Service: a distributed content and registry layer, a discovery layer, and a content-aggregation layer that moves beyond curation and discovery to facilitate data and text mining.
  • SHARE on the Open Science Framework—Technical developments pertaining to SHARE Notify are discussed and tracked in real time on the Open Science Framework. The SHARE Open Science Framework site includes a list of active notification sources and consumers, as well as information regarding prototypes, APIs, and other key issues. The site is open and welcomes public input.

Acknowledgments

SHARE is supported in part by generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

A wide array of stakeholder organizations endorse SHARE’s goals. If you would like to add your organization to our list of stakeholders, please e-mail info@www.share-research.org.

Comments, Questions, Conversation

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