D-Lib Magazine

Internet-based file-sharing services such as Dropbox and Google Drive can be easy and convenient to use, whether via the touch of an app on a mobile

To Save or Not to Save...  My old mentor, Tom Powers, used to say that the business of archives is not just about saving things, but also t...

A recent study sent data requests to 200 authors of economics articles where it was stated ‘data available upon request’. Most of the authors refused. What does the scientific community…

Dude cooked his data, got five years in prison for defrauding the government.

UC San Diego has sued USC and a nationally recognized Alzheimer's disease researcher, alleging that they illegally conspired to take federal funding, data and employees from a UC San Diego study center on the illness.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information

From fabricated studies on changing attitudes toward gay rights to stats-skewing by esteemed columnists, we’re awash in fake data. So what’s a reader to do?

In 2002, an article in the Washington Monthly explored a new trend called "open-source biology." It asked, "Can a band of biologists who share data...

Data management plans as expectations of the grant proposal process are still fairly novel, and the expected format and content of these plans is still evolving. The objective of this research is to gain a greater understanding of the expected content for data management plans submitted as part of grant proposals to federal funding agencies. This paper examines federal funding agencies’ data management plan guidelines in relation to the broad elements of data management identified by the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data: Description, Impact, Content & Format, Protection, Preservation, Access, and Transfer of Responsibility. Specifically, statements in agencies’ guidelines were categorized into the most applicable category (or categories). The representation of each category within each agency’s guidelines was addressed, and the statements falling in each category were analyzed. Some categories, including Access and Preservation, were represented in all or nearly all of the guidelines examined. Other categories — Impact and Transfer of Responsibility — were rarely addressed. The expectations for data management plans are evolving and will likely continue to evolve as more agencies require them.

Wherein I reiterate what others have said and express frustration with The Powers That Be  Of all of the problems in the world of data sharing, the most frustrating to me is the data that are shared but are completely unusable to others. As I've argued before (and of course, I'm not alone in this ar

The effective long-term curation of digital content requires expert analysis, policy setting, and decision making, and a robust technical infrastructure that can effect and enforce curation policies and implement appropriate curation activities. Since the number, size, and diversity of content under curation management will undoubtedly continue to grow over time, and the state of curation understanding and best practices relative to that content will undergo a similar constant evolution, one of the overarching design goals of a sustainable curation infrastructure is flexibility. In order to provide the necessary flexibility of deployment and configuration in the face of potentially disruptive changes in technology, institutional mission, and user expectation, a useful design metaphor is provided by the Unix pipeline, in which complex behavior is an emergent property of the coordinated action of a number of simple independent components. The decomposition of repository function into a highly granular and orthogonal set of independent but interoperable micro-services is consistent with the principles of prudent engineering practice. Since each micro-service is small and self-contained, they are individually more robust and collectively easier to implement and maintain. By being freely interoperable in various strategic combinations, any number of micro-services-based repositories can be easily constructed to meet specific administrative or technical needs. Importantly, since these repositories are purposefully built from policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components to provide the function minimally necessary for a specific context, they are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions. The University of California Curation Center has developed an open source micro-services infrastructure that is being used to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University system and a number of non-university content partners. This paper provides a review of the conceptual design and technical implementation of this micro-services environment, a case study of initial deployment, and a look at ongoing micro-services developments.

Post by Laura Schnitker, University of Maryland, College Park On March 26, 1971, an up-and-coming folk singer named Don McLean sat down for an interview a...

[This is an updated version of a blog post I wrote three years ago, which organized introductory resources for a workshop. Getting ready for another workshop this summer, I glanced back at the old …

Sound is not permanent, and much of the recorded recent history of humanity is currently disintegrating. Robert Barry reports from the British Library Sound Archive and Internet Archive to find out what's being done to preserve these audio records, and explains what you can do to help