Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• We gathered potential stakeholders of DataUp in Santa Barbara, CA for a meeting to discuss the tool’s future directions. The meeting took place April 2‐3 at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). The meeting report is available at
  https://bitbucket.org/dataup/main/downloads/DataUpReport.pdf.
• Strasser held a DataUp workshop at the UC Berkeley Library on April 11.
• Strasser virtually presented on DataUp at the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 2013 Meeting in Indianapolis, IN. The video is available at http://vimeo.com/63614563.
• Strasser presented on DataUp at a workshop for graduate students during the International Association of Landscape Ecologists 2013 Meeting in Austin, TX on April 16. Slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/carlystrasser/dataup-for-the-iale-2013-meeting.
• Strasser visited the California Polytechnic State University on April 18 and presented on DataUp to the librarians and researchers. Slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/carlystrasser/dataup-presentation-at-cal-poly.

DataUp Service Description
The DataUp add-in and web application help researchers organize, manage, archive, and share their tabular data. The major functionality of both tools is to guide researchers through the following:

• Carry out a best practices check to determine if there are issues present that might make use or interpretation of the data difficult
• Create metadata in standardized EML (Ecological Metadata Language) format
• Describe the attributes (i.e. columns) of the dataset in standard EML format
• Obtain a unique identifier for the dataset
• Generate a data citation
• Post the data and associated metadata to a data repository

DataUp Service Manager
Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

DataUp Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
The most current DataUp information is on the website (http://dataup.cdlib.org). This includes frequently asked questions and instructions on accessing and using DataUp. Other relevant sites include the code site (https://bitbucket.org/dataup/main) and the web application site (http://dataup.org).

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• Strasser provided a demonstration of DataUp to attendees at the Beyond the PDF 2 Conference, held in Amsterdam.
• Strasser submitted a paper on DataUp and the DMPTool to the Research Data Management
  Infrastructure Meeting in Washington DC. The PDF is available here.
• Strasser presented a webinar to the USGS community on DataUp; slides are available here.
• Strasser attended UC Merced Library’s Research Week Events and presented on DataUp; slides are available here.
• We had an intern, Sarina Sinick, from the University of Illinois working at the CDL on DataUp as part of the GSLIS Alternative Spring Break. She focused on improving the DataUp technical documentation.
• We reorganized the DataUp BitBucket site to improve readability and usability.

DataUp Service Description
The DataUp add-in and web application help researchers organize, manage, archive, and share their tabular data. The major functionality of both tools is to guide researchers through the following:

• Carry out a best practices check to determine if there are issues present that might make use or interpretation of the data difficult
• Create metadata in standardized EML (Ecological Metadata Language) format
• Describe the attributes (i.e. columns) of the dataset in standard EML format
• Obtain a unique identifier for the dataset
• Generate a data citation
• Post the data and associated metadata to a data repository

DataUp Service Manager
Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

DataUp Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
The most current DataUp information is on the website (http://dataup.cdlib.org). This includes frequently asked questions and instructions on accessing and using DataUp. Other relevant sites include the code site (https://bitbucket.org/dataup/main) and the web application site (http://dataup.org).

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• Strasser, Kunze, and Cruse presented DataUp as a poster at the 2013 International Data Curation Conference, held in Amsterdam in January, receiving 2nd place in the poster competition.
• Strasser presented the DataUp poster at the 2013 iConference in Fort Worth, Texas in February.
• We have been working towards securing future funding for DataUp development via both governmental and non-governmental grants, as well as partnerships with academic and non-academic organizations interested in the tool.
• We are planning a meeting to discuss the future of DataUp in Santa Barbara in April.
• We released the User’s guide for the DataUp web-based application, which is now available on the https://bitbucket.org/dataup/main/downloads (a free source code hosting service).

DataUp Service Description
The DataUp add-in and web application help researchers organize, manage, archive, and share their tabular data. The major functionality of both tools is to guide researchers through the following:

• Carry out a best practices check to determine if there are issues present that might make use or interpretation of the data difficult
• Create metadata in standardized EML (Ecological Metadata Language) format
• Describe the attributes (i.e. columns) of the dataset in standard EML format
• Obtain a unique identifier for the dataset
• Generate a data citation
• Post the data and associated metadata to a data repository

DataUp Service Manager
Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

DataUp Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
The most current DataUp information is on the website (http://dataup.cdlib.org). This includes frequently asked questions and instructions on accessing and using DataUp. Other relevant sites include the code site (https://bitbucket.org/dataup/main) and the web application site (https://dataup.org/).

Patricia Cruse, CDL’s Director of Digital Preservation (UC3), will be reducing her duties at the CDL between January 14 and June 30, 2013.  Trisha will be working remotely from Italy and Spain while she accompanies her husband on his sabbatical from the University of San Francisco (USF).  During this time Trisha will continue working on various initiatives on a limited basis and will be available via email at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu.   Please don’t hesitate to contact Trisha about work or great places to see or eat in Italy or Spain!

Rosalie Lack, who has returned to CDL to assume the duties of the Web Archiving Service (WAS) manager, will take on many of the responsibilities for the day-to-day running of UC3.  These include administrative and systemwide activities as well as budgetary, communication, outreach, marketing and UC3 team management.   Rosalie can be reached at rosalie.lack@ucop.edu.

Note that these are all customizable so don’t hesitate to give these your own personal touch AND if you do customize them please let us know and we can find a way to share them with your campus colleagues.  We also learned at the workshops that you want to hear what other campuses are doing so hopefully we can get these conversations started.

• We successfully established a “Practice Repository” for DataUp, allowing those interested in using DataUp in practice mode to get an identifier and archive their practice data without impacting the legitimate content in ONEShare.
• DataUp was featured at the Microsoft Research booth during the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2012 Fall Meeting in San Francisco, CA (3-7 December). Visitors to the booth could watch a demonstration of DataUp and ask questions about its features.
• Strasser presented on DataUp at the AGU meeting for a session on tools and workflows for research data (invited).
• DataUp was presented at the Coalition for Networked Information 2012 Members Meeting in Washington, DC (10-11 December) by Strasser. The presentation was part of a session on tools for managing and archiving research data.
• We presented DataUp to the UC libraries community at two, two-day workshops on data curation in early November. The first workshop took place in Oakland (8-9 November), and the second was at UC Irvine (13-14 November).

DataUp Service Description
The DataUp add-in and web application help researchers organize, manage, archive, and share their tabular data. The major functionality of both tools is to guide researchers through the following:

• Carry out a best practices check to determine if there are issues present that might make use or interpretation of the data difficult
• Create metadata in standardized EML (Ecological Metadata Language) format
• Describe the attributes (i.e. columns) of the dataset in standard EML format
• Obtain a unique identifier for the dataset
• Generate a data citation
• Post the data and associated metadata to a data repository

DataUp Service Manager
Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.

DataUp Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
The most current DataUp information is on the website (http://dataup.cdlib.org). This includes frequently asked questions and instructions on accessing and using DataUp. Other relevant sites include the code site (https://bitbucket.org/dataup/main) and the web application site (http://dataup.org).

The DataUp Project. The University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library continued to produce useful tools and services in support of digital preservation with DataUp, “an open source tool helping researchers document, manage, and archive their tabular data… within the scientist’s workflow.”

End of Term Web Archive. The End of Term 2012 project got underway to capture U.S. Government websites between the first and second administration of President Barack Obama. Project partners include the California Digital Library, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, University of North Texas Libraries and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

We have also been participating through meetings and briefings in the development of another project on the list, the Digital Preservation Network.

The rest of this “Top Ten” list is equally impressive and it is heartening to realize that so much has been accomplished in the area of digital preservation in our community. Yet I can’t help but note that it can still be a hard sell to administrators to justify new or increased expenditures for something that seems abstract, unpredictable and never ending. This challenge was magnified for me recently when I presented a paper in December, 2012 at the 3rd conference on Cultural Heritage online – Trusted Digital Repositories & Trusted Professionals in Florence, Italy.

The conference began with a parade of local officials and cultural heritage ministers from the city and region, all extolling the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the digital age. Indeed, the commitment to preservation is everywhere in this city that was the heart of the Renaissance, its museums and public places overflowing with the riches of the past. I was particularly struck by the exhibits at the Galileo Museum

Sundials, Galileo Museum, Florence

where the artifacts and experimental documentation of not only Galileo but also his contemporaries were showcased in spectacular fashion. Even with all of the support given to cultural heritage, the Italians at the conference still feel they need to shore up digital preservation, but they were focusing on standards and compliance more than on basic funding.

My presentation, on the other hand, was about how we have shifted from talking about preservation as an ultimate and costly activity to curation as part of the ongoing process of creating and managing digital content. We must be aware of incentives—such as mandates from funders and publishers rather than government initiatives–for our researchers to practice good stewardship of their research output. Thus we have invested in tools such as the DataUP mentioned by LC as well as the Data Management Planning Tool (DMPTool which made the 2011 Top Ten list), EZID (which won the DataCite 2012 Gold Award for assigning more than 250,000 DOIs (digital object identifiers) in one year), and the Web Archiving Service to make it digital content easier to manage when it comes time to preserve it for the future. After all, today’s research can become tomorrow’s cultural heritage and think what we would be missing if we weren’t able to see what Galileo was up to.

See the full article at http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/01/top-10-digital-preservation-developments-of-2012/

Congratulations to our UC3 colleagues at CDL, along with our partners in these endeavors including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft Research Connections and DataONE for DataUp; and Harvard University Library, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, University of North Texas Libraries and the U.S. Government Printing Office for the End of Term Web Archive.

Mark your calendars for the 2012 DataUp webinar on October 3^rd at 2:00 PM!

In brief: In the last year, the DataUp (formerly DCXL) project has built a tool to facilitate data management, sharing, and archiving for scientists.  This webinar will showcase the new tool and describe how it can be used to help researchers with data stewardship.  See “More info” below for a more extensive description of the project or visit http://dataup.cdlib.org (live October 2).

This free webinar will cover:

The evolution of the project, including requirements collection from researchers

The major features of the DataUp tool, including a demonstration

Future directions and how the community can get involved

Who should attend: This webinar will be informative for researchers and librarians supporting researchers.

Please pre-register for this free webinar: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/smn7td9qdoyd

Webinar Details:

Wed, 3 October, 2012

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM PDT

Presenter: Carly Strasser (DataUp project manager)

- – - – - - 

More information about DataUp: 

Data generated by researchers is increasingly born digital and subject to intensive transformation and analyses before publication.  The various file formats, software, and hardware required to succeed in the modern research landscape can become daunting, especially since education about digital data management has not kept pace with these technological advancements.  There is a significant gap between the data management skills needed by modern researchers and their current abilities; the gap is more noticeable given the current increase in funder requirements for data management plans and requests by journal publishers to make supporting data publicly available alongside traditional research articles.

The DataUp project was born out of this need for seamless integration of data management into the researchers’ current workflows.  We recognized that the large majority of Earth, environmental, and ecological scientists use spreadsheets in the course of their data collection and organization; rather than requiring they learn a new program, we decided to meet them where they already work: Microsoft® Excel and related spreadsheet software. 

The DataUp project’s goals were to facilitate data management, sharing, and archiving for scientists.  To do this, we built two versions of DataUp: an open-source add-in (extension) for Microsoft® Excel and an open-source web application.  

Both the add-in and the web application provide users with the ability to 

1. Perform a “best practices check” to ensure data are well formatted and organized

2. Create standardized metadata, or a description of the data, using a wizard-style template

3. Retrieve a unique identifier for their dataset from their data repository

4. Post their datasets and associated metadata to the repository.