Research Data Access & Preservation Workshop: Collaborative Curation of Open Educational Datasets
The RDAP Education & Resources committee presents the second in a series of online, interactive workshops: Collaboratively Curating Open, Educational Datasets. Participants in this event will have an opportunity to gain hands-on experience with common data curation strategies and tools by curating a publicly available dataset to improve its FAIR-ness and educational fitness-for-purpose.
Objectives
The purpose of this workshop is to offer librarians interested in data curation to work with experienced data curators in a hands-on professional development and networking opportunity. Broadly, through this and similar workshops we will:
- Encourage the use of authentic data for educational purposes, including data curation best practices and the application of domain specific methods where appropriate.
- Identify and publish a detailed process for creating a semi-clean dataset through collaboration with team members who have data curation or disciplinary expertise. The curated datasets will be contextualized by creating one or more sample lessons with learning objectives that can be supported with the available dataset. Open platforms and technologies will be used to the extent possible.
- Document a process for migrating publicly available data in proprietary, obsolescent file formats to open, preservation formats. To the extent possible, we will also create descriptive data documentation to facilitate discovery and use of the data.
- Use community developed resources for data curation, education, and public access in order to encourage their adoption in other contexts.
Before the hackathon:
Attendees are encouraged to preview the data, which are available from the University of New Mexico. The first link below points to an online finding aid which describes the papers, data, and other materials that Professor Linda Cordell archived at the UNM Center for Southwest Research. The second link points to a digitized subset of those materials, including data, made available through the New Mexico Digital Collections.
- Linda S. Cordell Papers (MSS 1058), Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico Libraries finding aid: https://rmoa.unm.edu/docviewer.php?docId=nmumss1058bc.xml
- UNM CSWR Linda S. Cordell Digital Media and Archaeological Data: https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/cordell
Please review the contents of both the finding aid and the digital collection.
Attendees are also encouraged to read the following two articles ahead of the hackathon. The first addresses the conceptual framework and principles that guide this kind of activity. The second is a research article that is likely based on analyses of the data we’ll be curating.
- Jeffrey M. Widener & Jacquelyn Slater Reese (2016) “Mapping an American College Town: Integrating Archival Resources and Research in an Introductory GIS Course,” Journal of Map & Geography Libraries, 12:3, 238-257, https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2016.1195783
- Larry Benson, Linda Cordell, Kirk Vincent, Howard Taylor, John Stein, G. Lang Farmer, Kiyoto Futa. “Ancient maize from Chacoan great houses: Where was it grown?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2003, 100 (22) 13111-13115; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2135068100
Note: Please contact the organizers if the Widener and Reese (2016) article is not available to you through your institution.
Resources
For the event, we will refer to the following references and resources:
- UNM CSWR Linda S. Cordell Digital Media and Archaeological Data
- Linda S. Cordell Papers (MSS 1058), Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico Libraries finding aid
- Data Curation Network Primers
We will work in a shared Google drive. The Google Drive URL and Zoom link for the workshop will be shared with participants prior to the workshop.