By Matt Mayernik, UCAR/NCAR
The kickoff workshop for the Digital Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC) program took place June 5-7, 2012, in Boulder, CO. DCERC, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), supports graduate student education and internships focused on data curation. DCERC partners include the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK), the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). DCERC grew out of the Data Conservancy partnership between NCAR and UIUC.
Sponsored by DCERC, three Masters students from UTK and one Masters student from UIUC are working as interns at NCAR over the 2012 summer. Their internships focus on learning about, and contributing to, data curation efforts at NCAR. The main focus of the DCERC kickoff workshop was to introduce the students to NCAR, as well as to their internship mentors. Each student was paired with a “data mentor” and a “science mentor,” with whom they are working over the summer.
The DCERC workshop featured presentations by a number of NCAR scientists and data managers, as well as presentations by data experts from other science agencies and organizations, including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the US Geological Survey. Ruth Duerr, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), presented her work in organizing a Data Conservancy Instance for NSIDC. Her presentation, titled “Instituting Data Services: Considerations and Evaluation Criteria,” discussed the background of the Data Conservancy Instance, its key features, and the motivations for implementing an Instance at NSIDC. She discussed technical and policy considerations for evaluating data curation infrastructures in different types of institutions.
The DCERC students will be at NCAR through July of this summer, and will return next summer for a continuation of the internship experiences. Two Ph.D. students, also funded by DCERC, will come to NCAR in the fall of 2013 to conduct nine months of data curation-focused dissertation research.
More information about DCERC, and the kickoff workshop, is available at the following links:
- University of Tennessee – Knoxville
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- National Center for Atmospheric Research (includes the kickoff workshop agenda and presentations).