The CLOSER Discovery team will attend and speak at this year's IASSIST conference which is being run in collaboration with the Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives (CARTO). The joint conference will run from 28-31 May 2024.
About the conference
The 49th Annual IASSIST conference and 57th annual CARTO conference will focus on the future of data in libraries, archives, and data services. The conference will take place from 28-31 May 2024 in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada).
The motto of Halifax is “e mari merces”, or “wealth from the sea”; this wealth was originally measured in fish, but today we could equally think of the wealth to be found in an ocean of data. Artificial intelligence, climate change, and a host of other influences are moving us into uncharted territory. This conference challenges you to chart new pathways and to think about using data to navigate our way to a better future together.
The conference will be held in-person, centering on networking opportunities and interaction.
Further details about the conference, including about the current programme and registration, can be found on the IASSIST website.
CLOSER’s presence at the conference
The CLOSER Discovery team will deliver two talks and a poster at this year’s conference. Further details can be found below:
Moving from project to infrastructure – Jon Johnson, Hayley Mills, Becky Oldroyd (CLOSER)
CLOSER is the interdisciplinary partnership of leading UK social and biomedical longitudinal population studies, the UK Data Service and The British Library. Evolving from a project to a sustainable infrastructure presents a variety of challenges at all levels both within an organisation, and for its collaborators. The presentation will reflect on these challenges from the perspective of CLOSER and more generally within a university environment.
Areas covered will include creating structures and processes which support the long term, staff development and training, the development of software and changes in technology to support these organisational changes.
The presentation will also draw some lessons that could be more widely useful from this case study.
Collaborations using common concepts: NACDA and CLOSER – Kathryn Lavender (ICPSR), Hayley Mills (CLOSER), Jon Johnson (CLOSER)
The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) and CLOSER – a UK partnership of longitudinal population studies (LPS) are collaborating with the aim of providing secondary data users with an effective way to view the research potential of age related data across LPS.
CLOSER and NACDA have implemented different metadata organization within their respective portals, CLOSER Discovery (discovery.closer.ac.uk) and NACDA Colectica portal (harmonize.icpsr.umich.edu). As two independent organizations, we intend to share information and in the future create an age-specific portal to allow comparisons across international borders, making it easier for researchers to find relevant data quickly, while supporting data harmonization, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse. Since the researcher journey broadly begins at a high level, then drills down to find the most appropriate variables, we propose to create a proof of concept at a conceptual group level.
The use of metadata standards and collaboration are essential for providing researchers with these infrastructures. Since both CLOSER Discovery and NACDA portals operate with metadata documented using the DDI metadata standard, we can leverage this in an interoperable way, without recreating efforts.
The presentation will set out how we have built a collaboration and will outline the likely approach to cross-country discoverability and best practice.
DDI training materials: A metadata management training resource – Hayley Mills, Alina Danciu, Kathryn Lavender (DDI Training Working Group)
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioural, economic, and health sciences. DDI is a free standard that can document and manage different stages in the research data lifecycle.
The DDI training materials provide an introduction to metadata and DDI, to those who are new to DDI – from the basics of ‘What is Metadata?’ to more detailed subjects like ‘Variables and the Variable Cascade’. They can be used for your own individual training to gain an understanding of different aspects of DDI, or re-used when developing training activities.
The training materials were developed by the DDI Alliance Training Working Group, whose mission involves introducing people to DDI and improving people’s competence in working with DDI. The resource has been published in the Zenodo community DDI Training materials in the form of presentations, and includes a guide for how to use them. In addition, effort has been made to translate several presentations into French.
The poster describes the DDI Training resource and how to use them for your own or others learning.