The abstract describes the article’s content as follows: The National Science Foundation and other funding agencies now require researchers to include data management plans with new grant proposals. Faced with this requirement, researchers are looking to libraries for help with various aspects of research data management and curation, from creating data management plans to archiving and providing access to their research data. The University of California Libraries deliver a growing range of services and tools such as the DMPTool, EZID, Merritt, Web Archiving Service and campus-based data management programs. This article discusses these initiatives, tools, and methods for campus engagement and faculty outreach, plus opportunities and challenges in developing library data services.

Congratulations to Joan Starr (CDL), Perry Willett (CDL), Lisa Federer (UCLA), Claudia Horning (UCLA), and Mary Linn Bergstrom (UCSD) on their article.

Researchers now must manage and share their data as part of research grants, and are looking for assistance in meeting these requirements for data curation. Libraries, data centers, offices of research and other organizations within the university are coming together to support researchers and to grapple with issues surrounding data curation.  The UC Curation Center at the California Digital Library has developed a set of services for supporting data curation, which are available for implementation on UC campuses.  Coupled with existing services such as eScholarship, they provide a range of solutions that can be integrated with those on each campus to create innovative services. 

In this two-day workshop, we will discuss the research data life cycle, and the tools and services offered by CDL to support it. You will have an opportunity to see the services up close, talk with the service managers, and learn about data curation projects happening on various UC campuses. Come join us for a discussion of the tools, resources, costs, audiences and benefits of data curation services.  Please join us.

Schedule and registration:

Please register at: http://uc3workshops.eventbrite.com/

The workshop will be offered at the following locations:

• November 8th and 9th — Oakland, California
• November 13th and 14th — University of California, Irvine

(We are still finalizing locations and we will share when available)

There is no registration fee and we are limiting each workshop to 50 people.

Who should attend?

This workshop will be informative for librarians and library staff supporting researchers, in addition to staff at data centers and offices of research.

CDL/UC3 participants:

• Justin Gonder, eScholarship Operations Coordinator
• Rosalie Lack, WAS Service Manager
• Joan Starr, EZID Service Manager
• Carly Strasser, DataUp Service Manager
• Adrian Turner, Merritt Service Manager and Data Consultant
• Perry Willet, DMPTool and Merritt Service Manager
• Patricia Cruse, Director, UC Curation Center, CDL

Please contact Patricia Cruse <Patricia.cruse@ucop.edu> if you have questions.

Merritt Service Managers Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu and Adrian Turner adrian.turner@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

Merritt Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars More information about Merritt is available at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt or by sending an inquiry to uc3@ucop.edu 

See also Merritt webinars: http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/uc3webinars.html

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• We’ve posted a summary of Merritt development activities and target timeframes on the UC3 Curation wiki: https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/Home and will continue to use the wiki as a place to update the community on activities.

• In coordination with the UCLA Library and DiscoveryGarden, we are planning to move forward on work to integrate Islandora with Merritt.  UCLA will be conducting the development work using a forthcoming Islandora API, with consulting, testing, and project support from DiscoveryGarden and CDL.  Islandora is an open source digital asset management system currently under evaluation for implementation by the UCLA Library.  We are seeking to deploy Merritt as the preservation storage layer under Islandora’s Drupal-based system, in place of Fedora, which usually fills that role.   We will prepare documentation, to assist other Islandora implementers with this process, once the project is completed.

• Work is in-progress on enhancements to the Merritt user interface, to support public access to Merritt collections.  This has been identified as the top priority for Merritt development.  The designation of collections and/or objects to be exposed publicly is performed by providers, based on local policy decisions.  Merritt curators will be able to designate their collections publicly accessible, and users will have direct access to materials stored in Merritt.  We will hold a webinar to demo this new functionality, once it is available. 

• We are documenting how UC campus libraries are utilizing or planning to integrate Merritt within local workflows.  Brief case studies — including recent profiles of UC Santa Barbara, UC San Francisco, and UC Santa Cruz’s use of Omeka with other systems — are featured on our UC3 Curation wiki.  • The UC Irvine Libraries are now submitting the content from their DSpace repository, called UCISpace http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/. These UCISpace collections include a number of resources from the Libraries’ special collections and archives.  Content will be submitted via the Merritt API.  Special thanks to the UC Irvine Libraries Digital Scholarship Service team, and to Matthew McKinley for his work to connect these two systems.

• We are in the process of contracting with the San Diego Supercomputer Center to utilize their cloud storage service. This will allow for further cost-savings and will extend the replication of content stored in Merritt. 

• We are continuing work on our self-audit of the Merritt repository, based upon the Trustworthy Repository Audit Certification (TRAC) checklist.  Information about policies and practices is being posted on the TRAC pages on our UC3 Curation wiki <https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/TRAC> and we encourage feedback and comments from the community. 

• We implemented a number of upgrades to our Ruby on Rails web application framework, which underlies a number of Merritt features and functions, and also added patches to our indexing system.

• DCXL project, sponsored by Microsoft Research and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, will enable the preservation and sharing of research data via Microsoft Excel. Merritt will be a storage node for this project, allowing researchers to save, share and preserve their data in Merritt.  We have been working with developers at Microsoft to permit the submission of Excel spreadsheets to Merritt.  You can read more about the DCXL project at http://dcxl.cdlib.org/?p=692

• We have staged collections that were formerly in the Digital Preservation Repository (DPR), for migration to Merritt.  This is in preparation of decommissioning the legacy DPR system.  We have contacted clients with collections in the DPR, to confirm whether or not they would like us to migrate their collections forward. Please contact us with any questions about this migration.

Service Monitoring and Availability Check Merritt’s system status page http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html

.       View the collection on the OAC

A soldier’s story

Henry O. Nightingale (1844-1919) was an abolitionist from Rochester, New York who at 18 years of age enlisted in the Northern army at the start of the Civil War. Nightingale fought in numerous battles, including the Battle of Gettysburg.

Nightingale’s account of the war is brought to life in the new digital collection, which comprises two handwritten diaries (1864-1865) and an undated portrait of the soldier with his sabre and Union hat. A majority of entries in both diaries describe the weather and Nightingale’s daily activities during his military service. The 1864 diary is notable for its descriptions of company and regimental movement, as well as a gunshot wound Nightingale suffered at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia.

The 1865 diary describes one of the most infamous events in American history. On April 14, Nightingale attended a performance at Ford’s Theatre. There, he witnessed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. Nightingale recounted the horrific scene, writing:

…in the last act, a most astonishing crime was committed the President.  Mr. Lincoln, shot through the head; the assassin then leaped out of the box on the stage and drew a large dagger and exclaimed “I have done it. Virginia is avenged. Hic [sic] semper tyrannis” and made his escape.

The outraged Union soldier went on to write, “God pity the rebellion now for Men will show no mercy; death to every Confederate, every Rebel sympathizer.”

.       Read Nightingale’s account of Lincoln’s assassination

If you find the handwriting difficult to read, don’t distress. Student assistants at the UC Merced Library have been transcribing the diaries, and the transcriptions will be added later this spring.

A missing autograph

The digitization of the diaries was actually part of an effort to uncover Lincoln’s signature and possible last written words. A historian and genealogist named Steve Nagy, along with his brother and a cousin, had inherited letters Nightingale wrote to their ancestor—probably as a “pen pal” during the war. In 2007, while transcribing the letters, a member of the Digital Library Team at Villanova University discovered a surprising passage:

I, the afternoon of the fatal day, had the pleasure of seeing the departed one, my object in going to see him was to get his Autograph in my Album. he, the President took it and wrote with his own hand several lines.

In other words, Nightingale claimed to have an autograph and inscription from Lincoln on the day he died.

Mr. Nagy, his curiosity piqued, undertook to find Nightingale’s heirs and see if they had additional materials where the autograph might be penned. The search took him to California, and eventually to Edith Denio, a great-granddaughter of Nightingale’s who was in possession of the diaries. Ms. Denio generously allowed UC Merced staff to digitize the diaries for public access and study.

And what of the autograph? Unfortunately it did not turn up in the diaries. Either it is in another volume, or—as Mr. Nagy conjectures—Nightingale embellished the story in the letter to his pen pal, and did not actually procure a signature from President Lincoln.

The making of a digital collection

The publication of this collection is the result of countless hours and hard work at the UC Merced Library. Since the diaries are physically fragile and quite long—together they contain several hundreds of pages—they presented a challenge to library staff.

Head of Digital Assets Emily Lin and a student assistant employed gentle, labor-intensive methods to scan the thin handwritten pages, as well as the many newspaper clippings and poems pasted into one of the diaries. Student assistants painstakingly cataloged and transcribed the diaries. Library Services Manager Mary Weppler-Selear took on the digital curation of the collection as a capstone project for a certificate in digital information management. She supervised the students, created metadata, and did all of the technical work required to contribute the collection to the CDL’s access and preservation repositories.

The Nightingale collection is available on the OAC and Calisphere, and has been deposited in the Merritt digital curation repository—thus ensuring both broad public access to and long-term preservation of these historically significant materials.

Explore other first-hand stories

Handwritten letters and diaries comprise some of the most engrossing material available on the OAC and Calisphere. If you like the Nightingale diary, you may also be interested in the diary of Patrick Breen, member of the Donner Party; the letters of John Muir, and words and writings from the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive.

Several UC campuses are actively using CDL’s preservation and access services for the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) of their graduate students, exercising a range of the tools CDL provides in support of the information lifecycle.  UC San Francisco, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UC Merced have all submitted ETDs to the UC Curation Center’s Merritt Repository, from which UC San Diego’s ETDs have been harvested and are now publicly available in eScholarship. Other campuses have chosen not to make their ETDs publicly available at this time.  CDL’s ETD service was developed with the support of campus partners; this most recent milestone of providing both preservation and access to ETDs was achieved through a strong collaborative effort with UCSD library staff.

Below are some questions and answers about the service:

Is the CDL able to provide an ETD preservation/access service for all UC campuses?

Yes. The CDL provides robust preservation and access services for Dissertations and Theses authored by UC students. CDL’s ETD service integrates the Merritt Preservation Repository with the eScholarship access interface.

Submitted materials will benefit from the long‐term curation strategies developed by the CDL’s UC3 group, as well as the visibility and robust access tools offered by the CDL Publishing Group’s open access, digital publication platform.

Must all ETDs submitted to Merritt be displayed within eScholarship?

No. Though ETDs can benefit from fully integrated preservation and access within this service, it is possible for campuses, departments, and individual students to opt out (if so desired) of the access component, as determined by campus‐wide or departmental policy.

What is the mechanism of the Merritt/eScholarship integration? Where will we submit our ETDs?

ETDs are submitted to Merritt. Those intended to be publicly available will then be programmatically harvested from Merritt, indexed and displayed with the rest of the eScholarship content.

How are ETDs be submitted to this service?

Currently, UC libraries submit their legacy ETD collections directly to Merritt. Merritt provides several methods for submission, including a simple web form, as well as RESTful APIs and other methods. See the Merritt User Guide for more information, or contact UC3 at uc3@ucop.edu with any questions about how best to submit collections to Merritt.

In the future, we may consider supporting student-based submission, using Vireo or other similar systems. This will require working closely with Graduate Divisions on campuses to coordinate all the necessary steps involved in submitting an ETD.

What about supplemental files – can they be supported as well?

Supplemental files should be submitted to Merritt alongside ETDs. eScholarship maintains the linkage between ETDs and their supplemental files, providing access to those files from the ETD publication view.

How do we handle version control? What if the ETD comes back from ProQuest with rights issues, for example?

Any revised thesis or dissertation will need to be resubmitted to Merritt as a new version. Merritt will persistently maintain all versions of a given ETD (and all of its supplementary material). eScholarship will harvest and display new versions in the place of originals as needed.

How are ETDs organized within eScholarship?

You can browse UCSD’s ETDs currently in eScholarship.

What do I need to do to contact to get started?

Please contact uc3@ucop.edu to ask questions or express interest in participating in the ETD service.

The goal of the DCXL project is to facilitate data management, sharing, and archiving for earth, environmental, and ecological scientists.  The main result from the project will be an open source add-in for Microsoft Excel that will assist scientists in preparing their Excel data for sharing. Initial ideas include generating metadata, incorporating links to scientific data repositories and their requirements, and using controlled domain-specific vocabularies.

The project has just begun, so it is still taking shape. Over the next year, Carly will be spending time with the Excel user community of interest – ecologists and environmental/earth scientists – collecting software requirements. Her work will involve trips to many of the UC campuses, as well as attending conferences and conducting phone interviews.

To facilitate communication with scientists, librarians, archivists, repositories, and other interested parties, the project maintains a twitter feed (@dcxlCDL), a Facebook page and a WordPress blog.  Carly will be documenting the project’s findings and updating the community on progress made using these tools.

Please contact Carly (carly.strasser@ucop.edu) if you have questions about the project, or ideas about how we might better connect with the user community. She will be in touch with librarians before her visits to UC campuses, so stay tuned.

The new Fixity service is able to perform its function with significant increases in performance and function over its predecessor.  Among the new features are support for wide range of digest algorithms –each exhibiting a particular trade-off between cryptographic security and computational efficiency; flexible reporting (although currently restricted to UC3 administrative systems and users); and the ability to validate content outside of Merritt as long as it is addressable with a stable URL.  The technical specification for the new service is available at <http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/curation/fixity.html>.

For more information please contact <uc3@ucop.edu>.

The Summer Meeting brings together people from research organisations, data canters, government, and information service providers to hear about the latest developments in data science, data citation, discovery, and reuse. It also provides opportunities to exchange experience and influence the next generation of data citation services.

This year’s program will include sessions on data citation, data publishing, and discussions on the new challenges that come with increasing access to scientific data.

The 2010 DataCite summer meeting brought together a strong program of speakers and participants (http://www.datacite.org/datacite_summer_meeting_2010). 

Highlights were published in D-Lib (http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1045/january2011-contents).

DataCite helps researchers find, access, and reuse data.  It is an international not-for-profit association founded in 2009 with members across the globe.

For those not familiar with the project Leslie Johnson, Chief of Repository Development at LC, provided a good example to illustrate how UDFR might be used:

“To illustrate how this might be useful, Johnston provides an example:  ’Say the archive of a famous writer was written with an obsolete program, such as WordStar, which would need to be either rendered for use, or migrated to a more current system.’  So, a decision would have to be made on which program or tool would be used to extract the information from the archive.  Johnston notes, ‘UDFR will provide the documentation to help make the decisions, and be incorporated into the tools themselves to make preservation format analysis and action easier.’”

 You can learn more about UDFR here.

Webinars are scheduled twice a month on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays from 2-3pm PDT, but check the schedule for exceptions and additions to the summer series.  Other topics may be to the initial list. We will use ReadyTalk to provide both desktop and audio access, and will add links to this page for slides, audio recordings, and notes after each webinar. Please feel free to drop in to whatever portion of the session that you can.

We hope to see you there and are looking forward to your questions, ideas, and feedback.  If you have a topic that you would like to hear about or would like to present, please contact: patricia.cruse@ucop.edu

Webinar information:

Phone number: 1-866-740-1260

Access code: 9879016

Readytalk webconference site: http://bit.ly/jdjMAP

Please share this information with your campus colleagues.   This series is open to the entire UC community.