Digital Curation Fellows - National Agricultural Library

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/26345

The iSchool Digital Curation Fellows program is a collaboration with the National Agricultural Library (NAL) to match students across iSchool programs with digital curation research opportunities at NAL. In collaboration with iSchool faculty and postdoctoral associates, students work with divisions across the NAL to solve problems and conduct research on various NAL digital curation initiatives, including data recovery and data curation, digital preservation, archiving and digitization, data science and analytics, user experience, and building historical digital collections for public use. This collection represents the outcomes of the NAL iSchool Digital Curation Fellows program.

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Author: search.filters.author.Nicholas, Phillip

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    Data rescue: An assessment framework for legacy research collections
    (2020-09-30) Hoffman, Kelly M.; Clarke, Cooper T.; Shiue, Hilary Szu Yin; Nicholas, Phillip; Shaw, Miranda; Fenlon, Katrina
    Widespread investments in the reproducibility and reuse of scientific data have spurred an increasing recognition of the potential value of data biding in unpublished records and collections of legacy research materials, such as scientists’ papers, historical publications, and working files. Recovering usable scientific data from legacy collections constitutes one kind of data rescue: the application of selected data curation processes to data at imminent risk of loss. Given the growing interest in data-intensive science and growing movement toward computationally amenable collections in memory institutions, the National Agricultural Library and other curation institutions need systematic approaches to processing legacy collections with the specific goal of retrieving reusable or historically valuable scientific data. This white paper reports on research conducted under the auspices of the Digital Curation Fellows Program, a collaborative research initiative of the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library and the University of Maryland College of Information Studies. We offer a framework for assessing collections of scientific records for the purpose of data rescue, developed through research on three case studies of agricultural research collections. This framework aims to guide data rescue initiatives at the National Agricultural Library and other agricultural research centers, and to provide conceptual and practical framing for emerging conversations around data rescue in the agricultural research community and across disciplines.
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    Maintaining Institutional Historical Collections through Rapid Appraisal of Employee Files
    (2020-08) Shaw, Miranda; Nicholas, Phillip
    In the past decade, institutions like the National Agricultural Library (NAL) have not consistently preserved records documenting their history. This lack of documentation has the potential to damage the credibility and transparency of federal institutions like the NAL. This paper considers how employee’s personal work files can supplement other records to document the history of federal institutions, and suggests procedures for rapid, systematic appraisal of employees’ files to support efficient collection development. In an effort to fill gaps in the historical record of the NAL, Susan McCarthy, Associate Director for the NAL’s Knowledge Services Division, donated her collected analog and digital work papers—amassed over a thirty-year career—to NAL Special Collections. McCarthy also hired two archives fellows (the authors of this report) to assist Special Collections with processing her collected documents, and to conduct research on rapid appraisal methods to support efficient processing of this very large collection. We conducted an initial survey of McCarthy’s files and found valuable information pertaining to events and activities in the history of the NAL. In order to rapidly appraise those materials for the collection, we crafted a collection development policy specific for McCarthy’s documents by researching policies at other national libraries. The results uncovered in this process indicate that institutions should seriously consider supplementing historical collections with employee’s work files, and conducting outreach for external help when appraising donations for these collections.