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Reflecting on RDAP Summit 2024: Fostering Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration

As a current library and information science MA student, attending the RDAP 2024 Summit Conference was a transformative experience. Throughout the conference, I delved into discussions surrounding the intersection of data accessibility, interdisciplinary research, and community-centered approaches. This immersive event not only broadened my perspectives but also provided invaluable insights that I am eager to apply in my academic and professional endeavors.

One of the standout aspects of the Summit was the emphasis on leveraging others' research, workflows, and insights to inform and enrich my own work. Sessions and presentations showcased diverse applications of research in enhancing data accessibility across interdisciplinary domains. Particularly compelling were discussions on reaching out to various disciplines to facilitate their data management workflows and fostering a deeper understanding of research approaches and purposes across disciplines. This resonated deeply with my research interests, especially in the context of emerging technologies like generative AI and machine learning. Many speakers and sessions resonated with my belief in the transformative power of community engagement in shaping research practices and outcomes. Furthermore, the Summit's theme, "Building on Experience: Centering Communities in Data Creation and Access," underscored the significance of prioritizing inclusivity and collaboration in data stewardship efforts.

Throughout the conference, I was inspired by the passionate speakers who shared their experiences and insights. Engaging with these speakers and fellow attendees allowed for stimulating discussions and invaluable networking opportunities. The enthusiasm with which my questions were met highlighted the supportive and collaborative ethos of the RDAP community. I enjoyed having the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences with like-minded professionals and researchers. The sense of camaraderie and shared purpose fostered an enriching learning environment. Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of practical insights and strategies offered to address real-world challenges in data management and accessibility.

Looking ahead, I am excited to integrate the knowledge and insights gained from the RDAP Summit into my research and professional practice. I am confident that the connections made and lessons learned will continue to guide my journey as a researcher and member of the RDAP community. The Summit has reinforced my commitment to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and community-centered approaches in data access and preservation efforts, and I look forward to contributing to these endeavors in meaningful ways.

As a Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University, specializing in gender studies and photography, my attendance at the Summit proved to be an enlightening experience, particularly concerning the accessibility, reproducibility, and long-term preservation of data and archives—a crucial aspect of my research in developing a queer photography website. This platform aims to showcase LGBTQI archives and contemporary queer photography images, necessitating an extension of my expertise in data archives and management. One key insight gleaned from the Summit was the significance of archiving research software, a topic previously overlooked in my considerations. The session underscored the pivotal role of software in achieving reproducibility in scholarly work. Discovering tools like Memento Tracer, facilitating the creation of repeatable formats for archiving websites, and OCCAM, ensuring the quality of scholarly software, provided valuable knowledge to integrate into my website development. By incorporating these tools, not only can the preservation of LGBTQI archives and contemporary queer photography be enhanced, but also the reproducibility and integrity of the research process. 

What stood out most during the Summit was the abundance of resources available for research data management (RDM). As someone relatively new to this field, the discovery of different reports on making research data publicly accessible proved immensely beneficial. Additionally, the Summer RDM Workshops offered practical guidance on integrating RDM into academic practice. The Summit served as a platform to explore diverse perspectives and initiatives in RDM, shedding light on the varying levels of support provided by different institutions. While some institutions boast robust support for regulated research data management, others are still in the developmental stages of their frameworks. Understanding these nuances will shape my approach to data management within my academic and archival projects, ensuring their efficacy and longevity.

Attending the RDAP Summit 2024 as a recipient of both the RDAP Summit Scholarship and an RDAP membership has been an incredibly enriching personal experience for me. The summit, held online this March, provided a platform for me to grasp the depth of the diverse and powerful world of research data access and preservation.

One standout aspect of this experience has been my pairing with a mentor, Ali Krzton, who guided me through the entirety of the conference's ecosystem. Initially, navigating the conference schedule and platform, PheedLoop, seemed daunting, but with Ali's assistance through email exchange, I was able to seamlessly explore the various sessions and workshops on offer. Ali has been extremely supportive, kind, and thoughtful in offering her help and insights, and her enthusiasm truly worked wonders. Ali's own lightning talk, 'Enriching IR Metadata via the DOI Registrar,' emphasized the need to curate and improve metadata for better accessibility and visibility.

Another session that particularly resonated with me was the keynote address by Iratxe Puebla titled 'Responsible Data Stewardship Needs Data Metrics.' The session underscored the significance of data metrics in ensuring responsible data stewardship and highlighted the potential limitations in the exposure of datasets despite having assigned DOIs. 

Another intriguing session was 'Bridging Data Literacy Boundaries with a Data Management Plan Email Course' by Kaitlin Throgmorton. This innovative approach to data literacy, delivered through asynchronous email modules, emphasized the importance of self-guided learning and leveraging existing tools for enhancing data management skills. It was one of the key takeaway sessions for me. As a frequent email user myself, I am motivated to simplify learning through basic technological tools. While email may seem basic to the current generation, its efficient use can make education accessible, enabling seamless and efficient learning for almost everyone on a global scale.

Throughout the summit, I took notes, capturing key insights on various topics, including all the new things that I learned about Research Data Framework (RDaF), FAIR data principles, open data policy, data sharing policies, metadata management, and transparent data metrics. Additionally, I gained valuable insights into initiatives such as the Data Citation Corpus, data catalogs, and projects like Make Data Count and DataCite. I also learned why and how research data access and preservation are vital components of scientific progress and integrity, facilitating reproducibility, transparency, and collaboration across disciplines. Accessible data not only supports knowledge advancement and innovation but also informs evidence-based policymaking and fosters public engagement with science. Ethical considerations emphasize the need to protect data while ensuring its availability for scrutiny and future reference, ultimately enhancing the long-term impact and relevance of research efforts.

I was thoroughly impressed by the remarkable organization demonstrated by the RDAP team throughout the entire summit experience. From receiving timely email updates to navigating the conference schedules seamlessly on the PheedLoop platform, which I tried for the first time ever, every aspect of the ecosystem was impeccably managed and easily accessible. The efficiency and attention to detail displayed by the team made the entire event a smooth and enjoyable experience, and I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it.

Most importantly and overall, my experience at the RDAP Summit 2024 was not only educational but also inspiring. It reaffirmed my commitment to advancing research data access and preservation, equipping me with valuable knowledge and resources to contribute meaningfully to this evolving field. I am greatly looking forward to contributing as an RDAP member in meaningful and productive ways in the upcoming year.

Nanditha Krishna
Integrated Masters (M.A) English Language and Literature (2019-2024)
https://nandithakrishna.home.blog/
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5536-4993
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Amritapuri, India

My name is Amara Hays, and I am a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. I am currently an MLIS student at the University of South Florida. I heard about RDAP through American Indian Library Association (AILA). I decided to apply for a scholarship to attend the virtual conference. I am grateful to have been chosen for a scholarship. I applied to attend the conference because I wanted to learn more about data librarianship. Specifically, I wanted to learn more about what data librarians do and how data librarians contribute to information science. I came into the conference with no prior knowledge of data librarianship or experience in the field.

Overall, I liked the varied content of the presentations, lightning talks, and posters. It really showcased the current research that is being conducted in the field. I felt that the conference topics and content were interesting and thought provoking. I appreciated that the presentations, lightning talks, and posters were clear and concise. I am a novice, and I found the research findings easy to comprehend. Some presenters went over their key findings more than once, which made their presentations easy to follow. I also liked that users had the opportunity to engage with the presenters in a Q & A at the end of each session. I was surprised by some of the issues that data librarians currently face. I had no idea that metadata could present so many issues. It was interesting to see the connection between my coursework and some of the topics covered in the presentations and lightning talks. I have gained a whole new appreciation for data librarianship and all that data librarians do by attending the conference.

I found the Pheedloop portal easy to access and navigate. I loved that I could attend the conference from the comfort of my home and choose which sessions I wanted to attend. I also liked the fact that there were many ways for people to interact with each other during the conference. I think this added to the whole experience and made it feel like I was attending in person. I can see myself attending another RDAP conference in the future, whether in person or online. Thank you for the wonderful experience.

At this year’s RDAP conference, I picked up a number of helpful tips for increasing the library’s involvement in data services. I belong to an R1 institution; however, our library doesn’t play a particularly active role in the data services provided on campus. As our Scholarly Communication Librarian, I manage our institutional repository and, as such, I am excited to have taken away a few more strategies for supporting researchers in the era of the Nelson memo.

From Iratxe Puebla’s keynote address, I discovered that our datasets—though they have assigned DOIs—may not be getting great exposure in the Data Citation Corpus. I hadn’t heard of the Make Data Count project and am looking forward to investigating further. Along similar lines, Ali Krzton delivered a lightning talk highlighting the need to enrich DataCite records with metadata maintained in repositories. This is something that our datasets would also benefit from as we have sometimes used rather minimal metadata when registering DOIs in DataCite.

I was interested to hear as well about data catalogs, as described by Anthony Dellureficio and Klara Pokrzywa from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. At Washington State University (WSU), we use an Ex Libris product for our institutional repository. It’s a tool that emphasizes integration between various kinds of scholarly outputs, but I am still intrigued by the capabilities of the data catalog to track use/reuse of datasets while also connecting researchers. I’m looking forward to investigating further, and I’m also interested in reaching out to our instruction team to see if we can try out some relatively low-stakes opportunities for increasing engagement around data. For instance, Elena Azadbakht and Teresa Schultz described a promising technique for delivering data management tips via email, using incentives to encourage campus involvement. We’ve tried something similar at WSU and I think we would benefit from circling back to this idea with some tweaks and improvements.

Many thanks to the presenters at RDAP for sharing their ideas and the Membership Committee for allowing me to participate in this year’s conference.

Like many of you, the Executive Board is left heavy-hearted almost beyond speech by the atrocities of the last few weeks in both Israel and Palestine, and the escalation currently ongoing. 

I am not an expert in this history, and do not have direct ties to the communities most impacted—I cannot speak for anyone but myself. But I have been listening, and the world is more connected now than it has ever been. I know members of our community are grieving deeply. Some of those we know and love may have faced almost unimaginable losses already. At the same time, the U.S. is encouraging escalating military force without restraint, in some cases even using language supporting ethnic cleansing or genocide—and I am implicated, too, because my tax dollars are part of the funding that seems to be available for death but too rarely in service of life, in the U.S. or elsewhere.

I know there is no perfect way to account for the generational pain, trauma, and myriad different perspectives of many in a short statement. I hope everyone is listening to the voices of those most affected who are managing to speak out. But there are situations in which to say nothing amounts to complicity with the narrative of violence as a solution, and governmental lack of respect for human life. This is asymmetric state violence. Islamophobia and Antisemitism are being used to stoke hatred and aggression across the world, including in the U.S. If we as an organization care about truth, data, and DEIA (and I believe we do)—if we care about each other—we need to support one another.

What I do know, in my bones, is that even when arguments can be made for the necessity of violence, the dehumanization of others is always evil, and leads to ever greater evils—and we are seeing it happen (yet again) before our eyes. People have inherent dignity; governments do not. No one deserves to be wiped from existence because of their identity. It is past time for a ceasefire, including a cessation of the blockade and widespread bombing of Gaza, and the release of Israeli civilian hostages. 

I know that I still have a lot to learn, and will make mistakes, but my heart is with those who are suffering; you are seen and valuable, and you do not deserve this.

In order to prioritize RDAP’s commitment to foster sustainable diversity and inclusion (Strategic Plan 2023-2026 Goal 2) and add to RDAP membership value (Goal 4), we are looking for one or two volunteers from RDAP membership to contribute to a 1-year (Sept. 2023-24) Task Force exploring options to integrate hybrid elements into the annual RDAP Summit beginning in 2025.

Membership on the Task Force will entail attending regular (suggested monthly) meetings, building on materials gathered via survey and generated at the June 16, 2023 RDAP Hybrid Summit Town Hall, and reviewing emerging research and recommendations on best practices for conferences, toward the goals of 1) making recommendations to RDAP Leadership and 2) generating and documenting next steps for the organization to implement its decided course of action. You can find the full Task Force charge here.

RDAP members in good standing are eligible to serve on the Task Force; to volunteer, please send a short email indicating your interest and mentioning any relevant experience to president@rdapassociation.org by EoB this Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. If there are more volunteers than the Task Force can accommodate, RDAP Leadership will reach out to volunteers to coordinate a selection process.

Attending the RDAP Summit was a great opportunity for me, and it allowed me to learn new skills and consider new perspectives that I am already integrating into my work. I am currently the Liaison and Communications Librarian at A.T. Still University, a graduate-level health sciences university. In this role, I split my time between being a liaison to several programs and overseeing the marketing for the library. Recently, I have taken the lead on re-launching our data services after the departure of another librarian, and I am acting as our data librarian for the whole university.

In this context, the RDAP Summit could not have been better timed, as it allowed me to see current trends and activities happening around research data management, and has helped me refine my approach to data services at my institution. I attended a wide variety of sessions on teaching, data curation, and data sharing, focusing on what is most applicable to my position. Of these, the "A Curation Primer for Data Accessibility" session deserves special mention, as it had me thinking about data accessibility in ways I had not considered before, and left me with a resource I can refer back to and share with others as I start to think about starting discussions at my institution about data accessibility. This session also echoes the keynote session on Indigenous data stewardship, a topic that I am continuing to learn more about and am hoping to start addressing soon with researchers at my university. These two sessions in conversation made me think about how little data accessibility and inclusivity have been addressed, at least in my own experience, in both librarian circles and among researchers and other stakeholders at my university.

One of the highlights of the Summit for me was the communities feature in the conference web app. Just peeking in on some of those conversations gave me new ideas and insights. I also found it incredibly helpful in orienting myself to ongoing conversations around research data, identifying new resources and readings, and helping me to feel a bit more like a member of the RDAP community. A special shout-out has to go to the Pets discussion board, which is the best way I’ve seen to help break up a long day of Zoom webinars.

To me, the most valuable part of the summit was simply being able to be a part of a wider community and participate in current conversations around research data. As a newcomer to research data management and data librarianship, this conference has really helped to inspire me and push me in new directions as a librarian.

My name is Lan Li, and I am a fourth-year PhD student from the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. There is one work from #Data Curation session that impresses me a lot: “Describing Data Transformation Work in a Changing Data Curation community.”

Data curation is an essential process that involves various activities that help ensure the quality and long-term usability of a dataset. The process includes activities such as data selection, cleaning, formatting, and preservation. The primary objective of data curation is to maximize the usefulness of the dataset, which is consistent with FAIR principles.

To achieve this goal, I have been studying FAIR principles on improving the transparency, reusability, and reproducibility of data cleaning work through provenance analysis. This approach involves tracing the lineage of data and metadata transformations that occur during data cleaning. Provenance analysis helps enhance the FAIR principle of data transformations in the data cleaning area by providing information on the origin, flow, and transformation of data.

In data cleaning work, various data transformations are required to make the data fit for use. These transformations can range from simple data formatting to complex data merging and restructuring. The mechanism of data transformations affects the dataset space and, as a result, the extent and difficulty of reusing data transformations can vary. My previous research focused on how data transformations affect the reusability of data cleaning tasks through provenance analysis.

On the other hand, this study on data transformation at a major data science data archive presented a qualitative analysis of the extent and manner change of data transformation during a 16-year period of organizational change. The study analyzed the code in data transformation syntax files and covered the size, diversity, and breadth of the code, comparing the characteristics over the years.

The study found that during the period of organizational change, the number of lines of code and the number of commands used to transform data decreased significantly, indicating increased standardization and efficiency. However, the diversity of data transformations increased, which may have been due to changes in data formats, technologies, or research practices. The reorganization had goals of increased standardization and efficiency, which were achieved through the adoption of standardized processes. The study highlights the importance of continuous evaluation and improvement of data curation processes to ensure that datasets remain FAIR and fit for use over the long term. Those findings can inspire me a lot when I continue the study on reusing data transformations from multiple people over the years.

I am currently a student at the University of Alberta, and I am in my second year of the Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) program. In the Fall, I took a course on database design for information management and became really interested in this area. This pushed me to want to learn more and informed my attendance at the RDAP Summit. The skills and knowledge I gained at the Summit will help me as I work towards completing my MLIS. For example, Ruby MacDougall’s talk, “Connecting the Links: Helping Humanities Researchers Use the Digital Infrastructure,” inspired me to investigate digital humanities courses at my institution that I can take as part of my degree. Before her talk, I had never even considered taking a digital humanities course. I thought that the data quality checking guide that Wei Zakharov presented in her talk, “Student Inclusion as Co-Creators to Develop a Data Quality Checking Guide,” was very interesting and it is something I hope to utilize as I continue to work through my program.

One of my favorite parts of the Summit was Dominique David-Chavez’s opening keynote. It really emphasized to me the importance of Indigenous communities being involved in any research about them. Indigenous people have always been data stewards and it is important that we recognize Indigenous intellectual property. I left the talk wanting to learn more about Indigenous data sovereignty, especially here in Canada, and have already started exploring the First Nations Information Governance Centre website.

The Summit exposed me to new ideas and ways of thinking, and I can also use it as an experiential artifact. At the end of my program, I need to complete a capping project and provide artifacts that show I have met the Program Level Learning Outcomes. One of those outcomes is “Professional Engagement” and attending this Summit is one way I can demonstrate this.

I really enjoyed how the Summit was online. As someone who works full-time and has two young children, the virtual format made it more accessible for me to attend. I was hoping to participate in some social activities and network more, however, my youngest daughter was sick (story of my life lately) so that kept me busy outside of conference sessions. Overall though my first Summit was a great experience. I left feeling motivated and inspired, and I hope to return next year.