Last week in her blog post, Margaret discussed the twitter feed from the International Data Curation Conference (IDCC) that took place on Feb 9th to the 12th. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend and participate this year, and as it is a premier event for data professionals, I’d like to add a bit more about the conference.
The theme this year was “Ten years back, ten years forward: achievements, lessons and the future for digital curation”. Tony Hey, formerly of Microsoft Research and now a Fellow at the University of Washington, was the opening Keynote. He did a very nice job of illustrating how far we have come in the past ten years. Data management and curation are now recognized as important issues and discussed in high-profile venues like Science and Nature. However, he also noted that we still have some very serious problems to address. Funding for curation is often based locally, but use of digital data is global. More and more data repositories and tools are coming online, but support for these initiatives are still quite fragile and we have lost some important resources (RIP Arts & Humanities Data Service).
This tension between how far we have come vs. how far we have yet to go was echoed in a panel session titled “Why is it taking so long?” moderated by Carly Strasser from DataCite. Some of the panelists pointed to a lack of incentives, infrastructure and support as barriers to progress. However, others noted that actually quite a lot of progress had been made when one considers the scope of the changes in culture and practice that we are championing.
Presentations on Data Education struck a similar tone. Liz Lyon, from the School of Information Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that roles for Data Professionals are becoming more prominent and defined, but the educational path to prepare oneself to perform these roles is still unclear. iSchools at Pitt and the University of North Carolina, whose program was described by Helen Tibbo, are seeking to position themselves as the places to fill this need.
Though awareness of curation has increased, we still have a ways to go in training academics in curation. Research done by Daisy Abbott from the University of Glasgow demonstrated a gap between the perception among graduate students that curating their work is important with their reporting that they lack the expertise to curate their work effectively. Fortunately, we have Aleksandra Pawlik and others from the Software Sustainability Institute offering Data Carpentry workshops to help raise data literacy levels of researchers.
The program with presentation slides is available on the IDCC15 website, and the papers will soon be published in the International Journal of Digital Curation. The location of IDCC16 has yet to be announced, but I highly recommend attending if you get the chance.