Hi everyone!

Things are busy here for the fall semester. My summer tour is over. I attended workshops, conferences, and set up site visits to some neighboring libraries to see how they run their data services. I wrote up notes for all these to share internally with my colleagues in the science/social science library and not all of it is fit for public sharing, but I do love establishing the model of reporting back from conferences and sharing what we’ve learned.

Do any of you formally or informally report back on conferences or workshops within your institutions or within non-institution groups? How do you do it? Right now we have write ups on our SharePoint server and I’ve been reporting verbally (very concise) at our regular meetings with the invitation to chat more if something sparks an interest.

In that same vein, the Yale Libraries’ Standing Committee on Professional Awareness is hosting a “Conference Recap Forum” today. I think this is a great idea and I’m excited to hear what everyone else has been up to. It’s a diverse group of librarians presenting in 10-15 minutes on topics related to their jobs. I’m presenting on basic elements of data curation issues — here’s my blurb:

Michelle will present on data curation issues in the life sciences based on what she learned at the Summer Institute on Data Curation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Research Data Lifecycle Management workshop at Princeton University in recent months. She will discuss what data is, why it’s important, and the main challenges, questions, and initiatives surrounding curation.

Since this presentation is for such a mixed group, it really is just an intro to the fact that data and data curation issues exist and are being worked on. Nothing too in-depth. I really just want it to be a spark for potential conversations among colleagues.

The more data-savvy of you may not find the slides or handout as helpful, or maybe you’ll have ideas about how I can improve the “pitch” to a group of more general librarians.

Slides are on SlideShare for download and also in PDF format:

hudson_SCOPA_2011-data_curation_presentation

hudson_SCOPA_2011-data_curation_handout