Jen Ferguson gave this presentation during the "Understanding E-Science: A Symposium for Medical Librarians" on February 13, 2012 in Houston, TX.

1. Jen Ferguson
A tale of two projects
Why
02•13•2012

2. First, there was
Reuse & collaboration
Annotating data sets associated with published papers.

3. (Have you seen me?)

4. Paper Microarray data set(s)
Software

5. Here’s what comes out.

6. Switching gears S
Why

7. Then there was
Reuse & collaboration
Creating an insanely great digital repository service.

8. The vision
A repository robust and flexible enough to support storage,
access, & discovery of the widest possible range of digital
materials created and used at the university.
Meaning?
Teaching materials ✔
Student portfolios & projects ✔
Research data ✔
And more.

9. “We have to respect that most folks chose not to be librarians.”

10. The tech specs
• Repository built in Fedora
• Perl scripts (not people) do most of the metadata ‘dirty work’
The process
• Meet with the client to determine needs & practices
• Create a customized Perl module to unpack/wrangle data

11. A case in point

12. Late-breaking news:
Got data!

13. isPartOf
JPG
isMemberOf isMemberOf Faculty isMemberOf Learning
Paper Papers member Object
PDF isMemberOf
isPartOf isMemberOf
Paper
isDataSetFor
Data Other
isDataSetFor
isMemberOf isMemberOf
Dataset Dataset
isDerivativeOf
isPartOf isPartOf
DAT SPS

14. Summing up U

15. Two very different approaches…
Created by scientists Created by librarians
Specialized solution Generalized solution
Discipline-specific Discipline-agnostic
Globally focused Institutionally focused
‘Downstream’ intervention ‘Upstream’ intervention
Metadata by external curator Metadata by content creator

16. The good news

17. Thank you!
j.ferguson@neu.edu

18. Sources
Harvard School of Public Health. “Harvard School of Public Health- HSPH”. October 13, 2011.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/
ISA Team. "Isa - About". October 6, 2011. http:// isatab.sourceforge.net/index.html.
Northeastern University. “Northeastern University: a leader in global experiential learning in Boston, MA”.
October 13, 2011. http://www.northeastern.edu/
Northeastern University – University Libraries. Annual Report: 2010. Available from:
http://www.lib.neu.edu/about_us/mission/documents/2010annualreport.pdf
United States National Library of Medicine. “Home – PubMed – NCBI”. October 13, 2011.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
Stock photos ‘Abacus’, ‘Chrome gear’, ‘Floppy disks’ and ‘Roll’ courtesy of stock.xchng. Available from:
http://www.sxc.hu/.