Librarians as data stewards: a case study of the UCLA Civil

Rights Project

Rebekah Cummings

May 10, 2013

University of California, Los Angeles

A tale of two research teams …

Digital Youth Network

UCLA Civil Rights Project

The problem of data management

Data curation as a solution

The UCLA Civil Rights Project

Overview

Data brought to you by…

Publications

“Data is the new oil”

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization | Video on TED.com. (2010).

Social Science Data Archiving

Source: Amy Pienta, ICPSR

Social science

studies funded

by NIH and

NSF

Data Librarians

http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/create-manage/life-cycle

ResearchData

Lifecycle

Most researchers:

Aren’t taught data management

Don’t know how to create proper metadata

Aren’t familiar with discipline specific repositories

Aren’t convinced they really have to share their data

Adapted from http://www.slideshare.net/carlystrasser/iassist20120608

Improved data transfer and storage

Data citation standards

Metadata standards

Indexing services

Trusted repositories

Technical Solutions:

Social Challenges

The UCLA Civil Rights Project (CRP)

As of 2012 the Civil Rights Project had …

no digital preservation plan

no centralized repository

no governance plans or workflow

Civil Rights Project Dataverse

Civil Rights Project eScholarship

eScholarship Usage Statistics

784 Views/Downloads from January – April, 2013

Workflow and Governance

Social solutions: changing the culture of data

Teaching in methods classes

Data librarians in grant offices

Workshops

Individual consultations

Acknowledgements

Dr. Christine Borgman – advisor

Elizabeth Stephenson - internship supervisor

Gary Orfield, Laurie Russman, Roderic Crooks, and John Kucsera - UCLA Civil Rights Project

Charlotte Brown, Christopher Felker, and Richard Fraser - UCLA Civil Rights Project Archive

Kimberly Gomez - UCLA Urban Schooling Division

NSF Award # 1216872